The main factor usually pointed to by the more realistic amongst us whenever the notion of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones doing everything in his power to find a way to land running back Adrian Peterson via trade with the Minnesota Vikings was broached was the limited salary cap room with which the Cowboys had to operate.
Coincidentally or not, the Cowboys today restructured franchise quarterback Tony Romo's contract, creating, according to Darin Gantt of Pro Football Talk, $12.8 million in space.
"A source with knowledge of the situation tells PFT that it wasn't a negotiated restructuring, but an automatic conversion of $16 million of Romo's base salary to a signing bonus. His salary for 2015 becomes $1 million," writes Gantt.
What is interesting about the $12.8 million figure is that Peterson is slated to make $12.75 million for the 2015 season, as Gantt notes. (Though there's the incoming 2015 NFL Draft class and the likely $5 or $6 million the Cowboys will have to commit to them to consider as well)
Peterson, of course, has become incredibly disgruntled after reportedly feeling little support from certain members of the Vikings organization, and specifically new COO Kevin Warren, during his NFL suspension which came as a result of a domestic violence charges in connection with an incident involving Peterson's then four-year-old son and saw him miss all but one game of the 2014 NFL season.
Peterson is set to make his triumphant return next year and is still under contract with Minnesota for the next three seasons, but the All Pro running back has made it abundantly clear that he has no desire to remain a member of the Vikings organization.
While the potential addition of Peterson would immediately make the Cowboys Super Bowl contenders next season and make for great theater - it was reported in the past that Peterson told Jones he hoped to retire as a member of the Cowboys - there are many angles to consider, as Eric Edholm of Yahoo! Sports points out.
"First, would Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer - a former Cowboys assistant for several years - sign off on a Peterson trade to his old team, when Zimmer has been among the more ardent Peterson supporters and is viewed as perhaps the one man who could covince him to stay in Minnesota?," Edholm writes.
The Cowboys allowed last season's leading rusher in the NFL, DeMarco Murray, to walk away to the Philadelphia Eagles in free agency this offseason, despite Romo's assertion today that he was willing to lower his salary in order to make more cap room to keep him.
Perhaps, as Edholm suggests, Jones didn't want Romo to restructure his deal in order to keep Murray because Peterson was, in fact, the back he had been eyeing all along.
"There's also the Peterson-Greg Hardy angle," writes Edholm. "Remember, these two men were at the center (along with Ray Rice) of the NFL's domestic-violence black eye last season, with each man serving time on the commissioner's exemption list for the accusations against them in 2014 in separate cases."
Adding Peterson after adding Hardy would mean a serious public relations hit for the notoriously media-sensitive Jones. Could he handle such a potential firestorm?
Of course, there's every possibility that this was simply a move by the Cowboys to give themselves some much needed salary cap breathing room, but it's hard not to see the electrifying and mouth-watering possibilities when the addition of Peterson to an already dominant Cowboys offense would create a unit the likes of which the NFL may have never before seen.
