Almost a year after Miles Austin emerged from obscurity to win a Pro Bowl nod and the hearts of Dallasites everywhere, owner and general manager Jerry Jones is still rather smitten with the young receiver. He proved it by recently gushing over Austin’s development which, as Tim MacMahon of ESPN Dallas points out, is all the more remarkable as the two are currently in the process of contract negotiations, which is usually the time for management to downplay a players’ impact.
Nonetheless, Jerry won’t shy away from questions of Austin’s potential. He still credits the 27-year-old with helping him get over the release of Terrell Owens, and he’s confident that, after three seasons of relative anonymity in Dallas, Austin has not yet peaked--all of which will likely be reflected by dollars and cents when (and if) a deal is struck.
“First of all, we saw enough that he was the principal reason that I was able to move on from T.O.,” Jones said. “I was very clear about that. It wasn’t chemistry. It was you had somebody big and fast that had really shown us that we thought he could do it. He was a little slow there, a little nicked up there in training camp, but then of course he had the year that he had. You’ve got a progression.
“You’ve got, in our case, three or four years of evaluating Miles Austin. The risk that you’re looking at someone who had one big year and never will have another one is really mitigated by the fact that we’ve had him that long.”
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