5 Cowboys on Thin Ice After Crushing Loss to Eagles in Week 9

2. Terence Steele, Right Tackle 

The Cowboys clearly didn’t learn their lesson when they drafted Taco Charlton, and he proved to be a bust — because I mentioned earlier, they did it again with Luke Schoonmaker. They targeted a position and rather than follow the board and wound up paying for it. 

They also didn’t learn her lesson when it came to Michael Gallup and his torn ACL. They gave him a mammoth contract extension in the offseason, and he repaid their faith in him by having the two worst seasons of his career. 

Despite the issue with Gallup being fresh on their minds, Dallas did the exact same thing with Terence Steele. A former undrafted free agent, he developed into one of the better offensive tackles in the NFL. He played well enough that the Cowboys decided to release La’el Collins and put Steele in the starting lineup permanently. 

Unfortunately, Steele tore his ACL and MCL at the end of the 2022 season. Dallas, then give him a five-year contract extension worth $86.8 million before seeing if his surgically repaired knee would hold up. So far that decision has been a huge disaster.

Steele surrendered eight pressures on Sunday and was one of the main reasons for the final drive falling apart. He also gave up eight pressures when they were dominated by the San Francisco 49ers in Week 5. Clearly, he’s nowhere near the player he once was but Dallas is tied to him for several years to come. Even so, they need to figure out whether or not he should even be on the field right now.