The Cowboys have a few elite players that are awaiting new contracts, in case you missed it. Although Oxnard’s training camp has begun, the controversy around Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, and Micah Parsons’ contracts has dominated much of the offseason.
The puzzle received a lot of attention on the first day of camp because everyone had a lot of questions for Jerry and Stephen Jones. The two men in charge responded mostly in the same way as they have during the offseason, adding a few additional words:
The Joneses’ primary talking points were basically the same old same old: it’s tough because of the salary cap, and it’s very difficult to have three elite players who all demand top-market compensation at the same time. Jerry Jones even went so far as to suggest that it might not be possible to form a complete team after signing these three players at this time.
These arguments have been refuted by others. When it comes to roster building, Jason Fitzgerald of Over the Cap outlined one of the main reasons that sets the Cowboys apart from the majority of the NFL.
In the days since that tweet, two more teams have managed to pay their quarterbacks more than $40 million a year.
The Packers extended Jordan Love to a deal that will pay him an average of $55 million a year, while the Dolphins inked Tua Tagovailoa to a contract worth $53.1 million a year. Both teams have three other players making more than $20 million annually.
Of the two other teams Fitzgerald mentions, one team (the Cardinals) is in a bit of a transition period despite having Kyler Murray on a large contract.
Not only are the Cardinals going through a rebuild, having just completed their first season under head coach Jonathan Gannon and general manager Monti Ossenfort, but they’ve been heavily rumored to have been shopping Murray himself.
The other team, the Bengals, are currently gearing up to pay star receiver Ja’Marr Chase, and the odds are likely he’ll make over $20 million a year.
The suggestion that an NFL team can’t pay their quarterback that much money and still field a whole, competitive team is questionable at best.
The Dolphins and Packers may not have made it far in the postseason last year, but they both had solid seasons and both managed to beat the Cowboys.
Other teams near the top of the quarterback market include the Chiefs, Bengals, Eagles, Ravens, and Lions, all of whom have managed to make it farther in the playoffs than the Cowboys.
The Cowboys are the most valuable franchise in sports and, despite that, sit at the bottom of the league in active cash spending.
That is partly because, as Kapadia explains, they drag their feet on these extensions and ultimately cost themselves more money while the market continues to surpass them.
Stephen Jones has made comments suggesting that the negotiation process is too complex to happen overnight, but plenty of other deals happen on a faster timeline.
This is where the Cowboys’ excuses fall the flattest. Everyone knew that extensions for Prescott and Lamb were coming up, and that they weren’t the only ones at their position in line for a raise.
Everyone knew Justin Jefferson was working towards a new deal, as well as the likes of young quarterbacks like Love, Tagovailoa, and Trevor Lawrence and even some veterans like Jared Goff.
Rather than working to get ahead of those deals, the Cowboys slow-played things, as they often do. Reports for much of the offseason have indicated that there were hardly any exchanges between the two sides, and the few exchanges that did happen reportedly lacked much in the way of substantive negotiations.
Of course, not much of this is new information. The only real change is that the Joneses made their comments at the start of training camp in an attempt to justify their inaction all offseason, and it only took a couple of days for two different teams to show things can be done in a different way,.
In the end, it leaves the Cowboys in a tight spot. They’ve run out of excuses, and they’re running out of time.
And with Parsons’ contract being the next big deal to get done – followed soon after by the likes of DaRon Bland, Jake Ferguson, and Donovan Wilson – it seems as if the team is just in store for more of the same outdated negotiation process that takes far too long and ends up costing the team tens of millions in the long run.
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