The Dallas Cowboys took care of business on Sunday against the Cleveland Browns and needless to say it was the kind of thing that we all needed to see from this team.

Just about every headline about the team between last season’s playoff loss to the Green Bay Packers and kickoff on Sunday in Cleveland had to do with a lack of free agency activity or contract extensions that were not happening. The Cowboys took care of extensions for both CeeDee Lamb and Dak Prescott recently and on Sunday the team in no way looked like one under the cloud that appeared to hover over them to this point.

It was impressive in this respect. We do not need to overreact and plan a trip to New Orleans, incidentally Dallas plays the Saints next, but we can celebrate that this looks like one of the better teams in the league.

Context matters in all discussions which is why we perform the exercise we are about to every week.

Here are our thoughts on Sunday’s Dallas Cowboys game, one day later.

The Eric Kendricks signing may have been a much bigger deal than we originally made it out to be

Remember that Eric Kendricks initially agreed to terms with the San Francisco 49ers. No, seriously. This happened.

It was an eleventh hour sort of thing how the Cowboys got the player who might wind up winning NFC Defensive Player of the Week with how he played in Cleveland. Kendricks was the first free agent signing that Dallas made and given all of the “all in” stuff, the initial deal with San Francisco and Dallas’ history with free agency in general, it was kind of a yawn sort of reaction from folks.

Kendricks was a star on Sunday against the Browns. While the Cleveland offense is hardly one to brag about slowing down, Kendricks was everywhere and manning the group with serious authority.

What’s more is that Kendricks did something the Cowboys franchise has not seen in almost 40 years. He joined Tommy Haynes and Jim Jeffcoat as the only three players to record two sacks and an interception in a single game.

It would be foolish to expect these kind of performances every single week, and for what it’s worth while Kendricks’ name is the one in the history books, Micah Parsons deserves an enormous amount of credit for the statistics he picked up.

But that is sort of the thing. Dallas finally has a linebacker capable of capitalizing on the chaos created by the teammates around him. Kendricks may have been the perfect fit for what this team has needed in the heart of its defense.

Speaking of!

Along those lines, Mike Zimmer may have been exactly what this team needed

It will be interesting to measure this defense against Derek Carr’s Saints next week (what a time to be saying this in total seriousness), but right now Mike Zimmer looks like the perfect person for the Cowboys to have turned the defense over to.

I’ll admit that I was skeptical and ultimately was down on the move. It felt like Dallas doing something comfortable and not trying hard to change, but maybe that’s because they knew the exact kind of change needed and the perfect person to implement it.

All throughout training camp we heard Cowboys players talking about the level of accountability that Zimmer was instilling within them. Cleveland ultimately put some points on the scoreboard in this game, but they happened when the Cowboys had called off the horses with the game well out of reach.

Maybe the Cowboys had a plan all along and it actually worked. Respect.

The Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb connection will define this team, both now and long-term

CeeDee Lamb “only” had five catches for 61 yards in this game, but the majority of his work came early on when the game was competitive. As Dallas put it on ice he also got a chance to rest.

That Lamb looked so good in the first bit of action we have seen him during was highly impressive. The same can be true for his quarterback in Dak Prescott, and seeing how the organization just made substantial commitments to them for the next half-decade, what the team does or does not accomplish will rest largely on their shoulders.

It is not hyperbole to say that the success of this relationship is among the most very important things going on with the Dallas Cowboys for the next handful of years. Seeing their connection and chemistry thrive on Sunday, albeit in a small sample size, was a great reinforcement on the idea that Dallas has made the right bet here.

The Dallas Cowboys have developed this reputation of waiting to sign their top players to new contracts. For whatever reason, they are content to let negotiations keep going and going, but that ultimately pushes up the price. As NFL contracts work, the next top guy always wants to get paid more than the previous guy, so there is perpetual growth in the market. If you wait, you’re going to pay more, and that is exactly what has happened with the Dallas Cowboys.

When the 2024 offseason began, the top of the market for quarterbacks was the $55 million per season deal Joe Burrow signed with the Cincinnati Bengals last year. Then Jordan Love and Trevor Lawrence matched that number with Tua Tagovialoa and Jared Goff just behind them.

A normal incremental increase would put Prescott at $56 or $57 million per season, just ticking up a little. But this is where Dallas’ earlier contract games with Prescott have come back to bite them.

In 2020, the Cowboys franchise-tagged Prescott instead of signing him to a long-term deal. Then they were set to repeat the franchise tag in 2021 before ultimately agreeing to a record-breaking contract extension. They waited until the last possible minute and after Prescott’s reps saw the Cowboys were prone to (repeatedly) using the franchise tag, they negotiated a no-tag clause in his 2021 deal. When the deal expired following the 2024 season, the Cowboys would need to extend him with a full contract if they wanted to keep him.

With that player-friendly leverage, it’s pretty likely that Prescott’s reps walked in and said $60 million right off the bat and held until he got it instead of the smaller incremental increase. So the negotiations in 2020 and 2021 potentially cost them $16 million from 2025 to 2028.

In 2023, the highest-paid wide receiver made $28 million per season (Davante Adams), but an explosion at the top of the market this offseason saw seven players eclipse that mark including CeeDee Lamb. Lamb signed his deal on August 26th, and by that time the market had climbed all the way to $35 million per season.

When the offseason opened in March, they theoretically could have agreed to a deal above the top of the market for around $30 million per season, but by the end of April, that was thrown out the window. Amon-Ra St. Brown and A.J. Brown moved the needle to $30 million and then $32 million within a couple days of each other prior to the NFL Draft. Then the big domino fell in early June when Justin Jefferson pushed the market to $35 million per season.

After Jefferson capped the market, Lamb and the Cowboys ultimately agreed to a deal worth $34 million per year as the second-highest contract in the wide receiver column. Over the course of the four years of the deal, it’s $16 million the Cowboys cost themselves by not doing the deal earlier at $30 million annually.

Looming now for the Cowboys is a deal for All-Pro edge rusher Micah Parsons. Parsons was eligible to sign a new deal this offseason, but instead the two sides will see him play on the final original year of his rookie contract. In 2025, he is under contract on the fifth-year option for $21 million. Surely he wants to make money money than that and make it sooner than those game checks more than a year from now.

Nick Bosa completely reset the market at EDGE in 2023 when he signed a deal worth $34 million per season, easily demolishing the previous high of T.J. Watt at $28 million per season. But with two more pass rushers topping $28 million this offseason, the market is going to rise rapidly to pass Bosa.

Waiting on Parsons could let Myles Garrett, T.J. Watt, Maxx Crosby, Joey Bosa, Haason Reddick, and Aidan Hutchinson continue to push the market higher, and as we’ve seen, the Cowboys aren’t afraid to use the franchise tag to push a new long-term deal all the way to 2027.

Interestingly, there is one bigger-money deal recently that they didn’t wait on. After rookie Trevon Diggs finished his third NFL season, Dallas paid him heading into 2023. He was the fifth-highest-paid cornerback in the NFL at the time and signed the biggest CB deal of the 2023 offseason. So how did his deal get done when the others didn’t?

Diggs was way more motivated to get a contract signed than Prescott, Lamb, and Parsons. As a second-round pick, he did not have the cash these other players have. At the time of his signing, he had only made $5 million over three NFL season. His $21.2 million signing bonus looked pretty great and they got him into the upper echelon, not reseting the market.

Lamb and Parsons were first-rounders and Prescott is coming off a big-money second contract, so they could afford to wait to increase leverage. Diggs chose not to do that.

Ultimately it takes two to tango, and the Cowboys haven’t wanted to dance with their star players until late at the ball, instead opting to wait it out on contract extensions. Despite the hand-wringing, they were able to get deals with these players and keep most of their core intact.

It’s hard not to think, though, about deals for other important players they franchise-tagged and let leave like RB Tony Pollard and TE Dalton Schultz, or a player they traded away instead of signing long-term like WR Amari Cooper.

The Dallas City Council has trouble sticking to its convictions. The conversation surrounding the proposed closure of the Skillman Southwestern Library proves that.

Facing a budget shortfall and massive pension obligations, interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert and her staff set out to find cost savings to shore up the upcoming budget. That plan involves closing the Skillman library in northeast Dallas, largely due to its close proximity to other branches and low foot traffic.

But a wave of community opposition led council members last week to tentatively shuffle some money intended for underserved neighborhoods in southern Dallas to preserve the library branch in a well-resourced area of northeast Dallas. While the full council has yet to weigh in with a formal vote, the move highlights a recurring problem at City Hall.

Whether it’s the botched charter review process this year or the unchecked scope creep in the 2024 bond program, this council caves to outside pressure when it faces politically difficult decisions.

If our local representatives capitulate every time an interest group champions a pet cause or challenges an unpopular but well-reasoned policy proposal, then Dallas will just keep kicking cans down the road. Facing unpleasant but necessary decisions is part of the job description when you sit around the council horseshoe.

No one wants to see libraries close. They’re hubs for learning, community and creativity. But the 13,200-square-foot Skillman branch sits roughly a mile away from the state-of-the-art Vickery Park branch that opened in 2021. The bright and colorful 18,000-square-foot Vickery Park branch has multiple meeting rooms, a children’s play area and a tree-lined plaza. Closing the Skillman branch would surely be an inconvenience for some, but residents still have a great library option nearby.

The Dallas Public Library system doesn’t have enough money in its budget to keep the Skillman branch open while ensuring all the city’s other libraries remain open at least six days a week, this newspaper reported.

Instead, the council is considering using about $485,000 meant for the city’s infrastructure investment fund. That bucket of money was approved last year with the purpose of encouraging investment in the city’s high-poverty areas, mainly south of Interstate 30, by reimbursing developers for the cost of building infrastructure or related work.

To this day, Dallas is defined by its north-south divide. Taking funds meant to reverse decades of neglect in southern Dallas to keep a library open in a better-off part of town makes no sense. Council members haven’t even voiced a plan for how to fund the Skillman library beyond the next fiscal year.

None of this is to say that council members shouldn’t listen to their constituents. But emotional and personal attachments can’t be the reason to ignore good financial sense. The council should be fair to southern Dallas rather than crack under pressure.

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com