After Ronald Leary left the Cowboys for Denver in Free Agency, they are now losing their second offensive linemen in just as many days. Doug Free has decided to call it a career after playing ten seasons in the NFL. That is a pretty long career as an average career of players in the National Football League are much shorter than in other sports.
Free is a 33-year old who has been pretty reliable over the last couple of seasons as she started 107 games of possible 112 since 2010. He signed a three-year deal with the Cowboys just a couple of seasons ago, and he was in his final year of restructured contract that was paying him 7.5 million.
Vice president of the Dallas Cowboys Stephen Jones, a son of the owner Jerry Jones, has dropped some hints during the NFL Combine that Doug Free could retire and those rumors ended up correct. Jones did it by mentioning that La’el Collins could play right tackle if Doug Free were to retire of if he was not around anymore. Coach Garret kind of expected Free to hang up the cleats, but he did deny it later on by saying:
“He, like all the players, they wanted to get away for a little while then get themselves recharged and come back to work. I don’t anticipate anything other than that.”
Well, it seems that a 10-year veteran didn’t really want to revive for football, but he wanted to recharge for life after football. While being a veteran of ten years, he was the guy with the longest tenure out of all the offensive linemen that played for Dallas in 2016 when they blocked very well for the rookie Ezekiel Elliot and were a big part of Dallas’ success.
