OXNARD, Calif. — Every July, the Dallas Cowboys’ future is filtered through a tapestry of numbers.
How many free agents were signed? What extensions were achieved? How many years remain on the head coach’s contract? How much money is left under the salary cap? And of course, the unyielding accounting of how many years it’s been since that last Super Bowl win (28 and counting).
Now we can add this: How long the staring match is going to last 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 plenty of other things going on with Dallas, but we’d be kidding ourselves if we think it’s not all a jumble of secondary storylines orbiting a supergiant star. And you really only needed to see the opening news conference kicking off training camp to understand the prism that Dallas is being focused through. With the clock ticking down on the first official practice of the season, it took 20 minutes and 40 seconds of the team owner/executive vice president duo of Jerry and Stephen Jones talking mostly about contract extension issues before a reporter took pity on head coach Mike McCarthy and asked him a question about the team.
“All right, here we go,” McCarthy said with a smile and a chuckle. “Let’s talk about football.”
A joking response that left Jerry to turn into McCarthy’s direction and interject about the previous 21 minutes: “Coach, that’s football.”
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So it goes for Dallas. The contracts are the football as much as anything else inside the franchise. And it will continue to be that way for at least the next few weeks — until something develops with Lamb’s holdout or the waiting game with Prescott. But in the beginning of that expanse, some things are coming into view. There’s a little bit of soft gamesmanship taking place between Prescott, whose continual line is that he wants to be in Dallas, and the tag-team of Jerry and Stephen, who continue to say they want Prescott to remain a Cowboy.
Thursday, the back and forth at least had 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 late in Prescott’s opening media conference, when sandwiched between talking about his affection for the organization and his teammates, Prescott offered 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 let out what seemed to be a snippet of internal dialogue.
“I’m gonna say it,” Prescott said, seeming to speak to himself.
“I want to be here,” he said. “But you know, when you look up all the great quarterbacks I watched [they] played for other teams [after their first team]. My point in saying that is, that’s not something to fear.”
He seemed to mean it more as a philosophical outlook than a subtle threat. But that didn’t erase the obvious implication, which is this: Prescott has thought about not being in Dallas … even if the vehicle of that thought was acknowledging that other star quarterbacks had moved on from their first teams. That’s not a nothing moment for Prescott, whose default mode is to steer away from controversy or strife the majority of the time he speaks. Yet this time around, taking a second to both pause and then say out loud, “I’m gonna say it” suggests Prescott knows how that statement could be absorbed. Maybe as a negotiating posture. Maybe as a gentle challenge to Cowboys ownership. Either of those is a fair debate. And now we can have it, because Prescott said what he said.
To be fair, Jerry Jones made a similar statement on Thursday, too, remarking that he can’t always afford everything. Which most definitely includes all the star players he’d like to fit under a salary cap, like his quarterback.
“I’m right there in line with his best fan,” Jerry Jones said of Prescott. “But believe it or not, in my life I’ve had a lot of things I wanted that I couldn’t get because I couldn’t afford it. Now, have I learned to live with that in 80-something years? You bet I have. And life does go on. And sometimes when you get a bump like that, you turn around and do better than you would have had you got what you wanted.
Again, there’s some philosophical bend to that statement. A suggestion that, hey, maybe it doesn’t work out and maybe it’s not the end of the world. But while Jerry has been much more abstract about his statements, the person who seems to be offering the most tangible guidance is Stephen, who rolled out some interesting tidbits on Thursday when talking about Prescott, Lamb and pass-rusher Micah Parsons, whose negotiating window opens next offseason.
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 little more ambiguous is the aim of Lamb and Parsons. According to Stephen Jones, it’s not as opaque as some think. Simply put, Jones says both players believe they have an argument to be the highest paid non-quarterback in the league. Which, at the moment, is north of $35 million per season.
“Both of them, rightfully so, believe they should be the highest paid non-quarterback in the league,” Stephen Jones said. “Totally respect that. So, very difficult situations we’re trying to work through with them.”
So where does this go from here? Stephen Jones said he’s “not aware of any drop dead date” for Prescott negotiations. And as for Lamb’s holdout, well, he seemed to be entertaining the belief that Lamb’s contract demands could eventually come down, similar to guard Zack Martin’s holdout last offseason, which was eventually resolved by adding $8.5 million in guaranteed money to the final two years of his deal. Pressed with the theory that prices don’t typically go down for teams that wait to do deals, Stephen Jones pointed to Martin’s holdout last offseason.
“That’s not necessarily true,” he said. “You think Zack didn’t ask for more than he got when he started [his holdout]? So it went down.”
And in a way, that’s really the final calculus in all of this: who takes what and how that impacts everyone else who needs to be paid.
“At there end of the day this doesn’t save Jerry and I any money,” Stephen Jones said. “We’re just trying to allocate. That’s a tough deal to do sometimes. What we pay Dak, what it will mean is we go to a certain level, then that’s certain guys we won’t have. He agrees to do a little less — you think [Patrick] Mahomes couldn’t walk in the door today and say ‘I’m not showing up’ and ‘pay me X’ — they’d pay him. We’ve got to work with it. There’s no animosity and no anxiety.”
Perhaps not. But there’s contemplation and waiting. And that’s what the Dallas Cowboys’ season will be about for the next few weeks, months, or perhaps all of the 2024 season. In search of some finite numbers, it continues to be a journey of longer and more.
