The best team building strategy? Optimal use of the tips from Round 5? – The athlete

In trying to properly break down as many players as possible, I think I neglected our Friday meetings a bit too much. So let’s fix as much as we can over the next few weeks (probably not Friday morning of draft) with some mailbag answers to 10-12 of the week’s top questions from our loyal readers. We don’t have much here at The Athletic if it’s not for all of you, so I need to improve to make sure you feel loved.

Here we go.

If you look back over the last 30 years, when you examine their team building strategy, do you think the Cowboys are too reactive and too slow to innovate? They were late in responding to the salary cap by overpaying aging players in the late ’90s. They were late in adopting the Patriots/Packers’ strategy of building by the draft and paying for their own. Now I worry that they might be late to other innovations in team building strategy because they are so slow to adapt (i.e. pay RBs when the rest of the league has already quit). I don’t necessarily think they should follow the Rams strategy, but I would just like to see more innovation and aggressiveness from them. – Nick M

Thank you Nick Good place to start here. I would argue that the Cowboys are doing a good job overall, stealing solid ideas and tactics from the winning teams. Very few teams are themselves at the forefront of innovation, and those teams are often there out of utter desperation. The Cowboys have almost never seen despair up close since 1989, so they’ve been doing what most teams do – watch and steal. No problem with that at all.