OXNARD, Calif. – Every July, the future of the Dallas Cowboys is filtered through a tapestry of numbers.
How many free agents have been signed? What extensions have been achieved? How many years are left on the head coach’s contract? How much money is left under the salary cap? And, of course, the unyielding tally of how many years have passed since the last Super Bowl victory (28 and counting).
Now we can add this: how long will the matchup between the team and two of its three biggest stars – quarterback Dak Prescott, who is actively practicing in training camp, and wideout CeeDee Lamb, who was nowhere near Oxnard? , California, during Thursday’s first camp practice.
There’s a lot of other stuff going on with Dallas, but we’d be fooling ourselves if we think it’s not all a jumble of side stories orbiting a supergiant star. And you really only needed to see the opening press conference of training camp to understand the prism through which Dallas is being focused. With the clock ticking down on the first official practice of the season, it took 20 minutes and 40 seconds for the duo of Jerry and Stephen Jones, team owner and executive vice president, to talk mostly about contract extension issues before a reporter caught on. Shame on coach Mike. McCarthy and asked a question about the team.
“Alright, here we go,” McCarthy said with a smile and a laugh. “Let’s talk about football.”
A playful response that caused Jerry to turn toward McCarthy and interject about the previous 21 minutes: “Coach, that’s it soccer.”
That goes for Dallas. Contracts are football as much as anything else within the franchise. And it will continue to be that way for at least the next few weeks – until something develops with Lamb’s resistance or the waiting game with Prescott. But at the beginning of this expansion, a few things are emerging. There’s a bit of soft play between Prescott, whose ongoing thread is that he wants to be in Dallas, and the duo of Jerry and Stephen, who keep saying they want Prescott to remain a Cowboy.
Thursday, the back-and-forth had at least one new wrinkle, with Prescott taking a momentary break from loving all things Dallas to at least suggest he’s contemplated life elsewhere. It came at the end of Prescott’s opening press conference, when in between talking about his affection for the organization and his teammates, Prescott made an interesting observation.
“At the end of the day, it’s a business,” he said, repeating a familiar refrain. “You know…um…”
Prescott paused for a moment and smiled. Then he blurted out what sounded like a snippet of internal dialogue.
“I will say this,” said Prescott, appearing to speak to himself.
“I want to be here,” he said. “But you know, when you look at all the great defenders I’ve watched [they] played for other teams [after their first team]. What I mean by saying this is that there is nothing to fear.”
He seemed to mean this more as a philosophical perspective than as a subtle threat. But that didn’t erase the obvious implication, which is this: Prescott thought about not being in Dallas…even if the vehicle for that thought was the recognition that other famous quarterbacks had left their first teams. This is not an insignificant moment for Prescott, whose default mode is to avoid controversy or conflict most of the time he speaks. However, this time, pausing for a second and then saying out loud, “I’m going to say this” suggests that Prescott knows how that statement might sink in. Perhaps as a negotiating stance. Perhaps as a mild challenge to Cowboys ownership. Either one is a fair debate. And now we can have it, because Prescott said what he said.
To be fair, Jerry Jones also made a similar statement on Thursday, noting that he can’t always afford everything. Which definitely includes all the playmakers he would like to include under a salary cap, like his quarterback.
“I’m on the same page as his biggest fan,” Jerry Jones said of Prescott. “But, believe it or not, in my life I’ve had a lot of things I wanted and couldn’t get because I didn’t have the money for them. Now, have I learned to live with this in 80-something years? You bet. And life continues. And sometimes when you have a bump like that, you turn around and do better than you would have if you had gotten what you wanted.
Again, there is some philosophical bent to this statement. A suggestion that, hey, maybe it won’t work out and maybe it won’t be the end of the world. But while Jerry has been much more abstract in his statements, the person who appears to be offering the most tangible guidance is Stephen, who revealed some interesting information on Thursday when talking about Prescott, Lamb and pass-rusher Micah Parsons, whose window negotiation opens next off-season.
While it’s widely known that Prescott’s next deal would make him the highest-paid player in the NFL at open market prices, what’s been a bit more ambiguous is Lamb and Parsons’ goal. According to Stephen Jones, it is not as opaque as some think. Simply put, Jones says both players believe they have a case to be the highest-paid non-quarterbacks in the league. Which, at the moment, is over $35 million per season.
“They both rightly believe they should be the highest-paid non-quarterbacks in the league,” Stephen Jones said. “Fully respect that. So we are trying to resolve very difficult situations with them.”
So where does it go from here? Stephen Jones said he is “not aware of any deadline” for Prescott negotiations. And as for Lamb’s holdout, well, he seemed to be believing that Lamb’s contract demands could eventually ease, similar to guard Zack Martin’s holdout last offseason, which was ultimately resolved with the addition of $8.5 million in Guaranteed money for the last two years of your deal. Pressed on the theory that prices typically don’t drop for teams waiting to make deals, Stephen Jones pointed to Martin’s resilience last offseason.
“That’s not necessarily true,” he said. “Do you think Zack didn’t ask for more than he got when he started [his holdout]? Then it fell.”
And in a way, that’s really the final calculus of all of this: who gets what and how that impacts everyone else who needs to be paid.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t save Jerry and me any money,” Stephen Jones said. “We’re just trying to allocate. That’s a tough deal to do sometimes. What we pay Dak, what that means is we’re going to get to a certain level, so we won’t have certain guys. He agrees to do a little less – you think [Patrick] Mahomes couldn’t walk in the door today and say ‘I’m not going to show up’ and ‘pay me X’ – they would pay him. We have to work with this. There is no animosity or anxiety.”
Maybe not. But there is contemplation and waiting. And that’s what the Dallas Cowboys season will be about in the coming weeks, months, or perhaps the entire 2024 season. In search of some finite numbers, it continues to be an increasingly long journey.
