Impromptu barroom debate time (yes, it’s before noon, but play along): who is the best player on the Dallas Cowboys?
Micah Parsons, probably, but if there is any challenger worth speaking about, it’s future Hall of Famer Zack Martin, who has made every Pro Bowl since his rookie year apart from his injury-curtailed 2020 season.
How about the most dependable Cowboy? The most important? The most assignment-sound? The best résumé? The greatest legacy?
Martin is either in the conversation or the outright conversation-stopper in all of those categories. There has been no better offensive guard since Martin entered the league in 2014, and at 32 years old, he’s demonstrated no signs of slowing down.
So it’s easy to spot the logic in ESPN’s Adam Schefter’s report that Martin is giving serious thought to not reporting to Cowboys training camp in Oxnard on account of his contract, which carries the ninth-highest average annual salary among guards and has him earning $6.5 million less than Atlanta’s Chris Lindstrom, the league’s highest-paid guard this year at $20.5 million. Lindstrom is one of many on that list who signed their deals after Martin, when the league’s salary cap had risen, which is sort of the point: those players aren’t out-earning Martin because they’re better, but because they got paid when there were more dollars around. And with Martin on the last wisps of an athlete’s traditional prime-aged years, why not cash in now, when he’s still at the peak of his powers and presumably can command more money than he would as a 34-year-old after his contract expires next season?
Until further notice, there’s no reason to expect this to get messy. As friend of the program Dave Helman points out, it makes sense for Dallas to play ball here, not only due to Martin’s significance but because reworking the $23.4 million cap hit he’s due in 2024 would be advantageous to the team, too.
Just don’t underestimate Martin’s capacity to dig in if he’s pushed—this is, after all, the guy who quashed a tidal wave of chatter calling for a move to tackle two years ago with a simple, “I play guard, so I’ll just leave it at that.”
And if you want confirmation bias about all of this, feel free to read into Martin’s new profile pic, which he changed 31 minutes after Schefter’s news-breaking tweet:
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