FRISCO, Texas — Monday and Tuesday at The Star — the Dallas Cowboys‘ team headquarters — were a celebration following the signing of 2023 All-Pro wide receiver CeeDee Lamb to a four-year, $136 million extension that ended his holdout away from the team.
Wednesday saw the festivities die down with the Cowboys turning their focus back toward another crucial contract negotiation for a player entering the final year of his deal in 2024: quarterback Dak Prescott, the NFL’s 2023 passing touchdowns leader with 36. Lamb himself even discussed pushing for Prescott’s new deal his media availability Tuesday evening.
“You look at our numbers together, they’re at the top of the charts,” Lamb said after he led the NFL with 135 catches last season. “I have no doubt that they’re going to get a deal done. We all know that I want Dak here. Jerry [Jones] wants Dak here, too, so let’s just get this under control and kill the speculation and let’s go win.”
The Cowboys owner and general manager discussed the topic of negotiations with Prescott on Wednesday, but surprisingly, Jones didn’t see much of a change in those talks following Lamb’s signing.
“That hasn’t changed,” Jones said. “We’re continuing to first of all, all of our focus on what’s coming up here in the next 10 days, two weeks. that game [Week 1 at the Cleveland Browns] takes priority over anything. Lamb wasn’t here. Dak is here. We have really have no more to do in those significant things we talk about every time we meet to have this season on go by opening day. It will remain like it’s been.”
Prescott himself indicated in July that his mindset flips once training camp comes around, but Jones relayed that he hasn’t been told negotiations will cease once their Week 1 game at the Browns kicks off on Sept. 8.
“There’s been conversations back and forth, but for the most part for me as y’all know, I let my agent (Todd France) do that, especially as we get right here into training camp,” Prescott said in July. “Day 1 of training camp, my mind flips to obviously helping my team and just doing everything I can within the organization and on the football field to make sure that I’m my best and everyone around me is their best. The money and all that will take care of itself as it always has.”
“No, not any indication of any of that,” Jones said when asked if he has been told contract talks will stop between himself and Prescott’s agent once the season starts. “That’s why I said it will be just like it’s been.”
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Of course, the longer these negotiations are drawn out, the odds incrementally increase of 2024 being Prescott’s last as Dallas’ starting quarterback. That’s because Prescott’s current contract possesses a no-franchise tag and no-trade clause, thus providing him ALL of the leverage in these talks as Jones cannot prevent him from hitting the open market in March of 2025, sans signing him to an extension. However, Jones doesn’t fear the risk of Prescott potentially leaving the Cowboys in 2025 if a deal isn’t done, citing his experience with risk since purchasing the club in 1989.
“I don’t have any comment there,” Jones said. “I have, from the time that I thought about buying the Cowboys, I frankly have never really dwelled on assessing the risk of what we do around here to be involved in the NFL, to be involved in football. It would be madness to say, ‘Well that’s risky.’ So I’ve been feeling extreme risky since the days I’ve walked through the doors here. So everything you do, almost, there’s risk involved. That’s the nature of the game. Sometimes it’s worked out really well. Sometimes taking those risks will bite you. I don’t believe the man upstairs gives anybody a plus or minus on when they’re taking risk on how he’s going to cut the cards. But I’ve had good luck taking risk. I’ve had drawn back a nub a few times. So again, I don’t want to even talk about any of the decisions we make on personnel as assessing risk. It’s all risky.”
Jones also isn’t concerned about none of his three quarterbacks — Prescott, Cooper Rush and Trey Lance — being under contract for 2025, pointing to the Lamb negotiations to illustrate both how being under contract doesn’t prevent a holdout, and when he puts his mind to it, deals can get done.
“Do you know in this day and time, you can have them under contract and they still not come,” Jones said. “So contracts aren’t the end-all solution. Some of the best decisions that I’ve been a part of with the Cowboys have been when we didn’t have contracts one way or the other, whether the player was on our team or some other team, so I quit a long time ago getting bent out of shape about having anybody under contract or not. There are all kinds of other things other than a contract that could change the outcome of him being under contract: injury, level of play. So you can’t just pick that and say that should give you a better feeling about our team or me a better feeling. The whole thing has a lot of moving parts. Now, I can live with that. And I do live with it. You have to live with it, because we play a game that it can change on the next play.”
Many have questioned what Prescott has to do to earn a top-of-the-quarterback market contract given that’s what he is asking for, after becoming the first Cowboys quarterback to lead the NFL outright in passing touchdowns (36 in 2023) and registering a career-high 105.9 passer rating in 2023. In the eyes of Jones, the Prescott negotiations don’t have much to do with the quarterback’s merit and more to do with his attempt to best manage the Cowboys’ salary cap.
If that was such a massive priority to Jones, it would have likely been to his benefit to get this contract done before Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence (five years, $275 million), Lions quarterback Jared Goff (four years, $212 million) and Packers quarterback Jordan Love (four years, $220 million) all signed new deals. Lawrence and Love are now tied with Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow for the highest average per year salary in the NFL: $55 million.
“You could easily say, if you hadn’t seen it by now, you haven’t seen it,” Jones said when addressing the question of what Prescott has to do to get paid. “I’m such a fan of Dak’s and appreciate all of the great things that we all know that he’s there. I appreciate his work ethic probably more than anything out here. I can’t tell you how proud I am that we’ve got him this year to start this campaign. Needing to see, I just gave an explanation where when you look at a situation, you’ve also got to weigh, ‘OK, what are the consequences of the other side of the coin.’ Dak’s situation, right now, for me, from my mirror, has more to do with our situation than it does with the merits of Dak Prescott being the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.”
The hold up between Prescott and Jones at this moment in time, as Jones alluded to, is how the Cowboys owner and general manager wants to manage his salary cap with a top-dollar deal now done for Lamb with Prescott’s and three-time All-Pro edge rusher Micah Parsons landmark contracts coming soon. The quarterback wants a fair contract based on the market. When asking Jones about his awareness of where his players’ contracts land in relation to the rest of the NFL’s positional markets, he dismissed the idea of not wanting to set the market as the hindrance in Prescott’s negotiations.
“At this time and at that time, [the WR contract market] was not the only one I was looking at,” Jones said with a smile and a wink. “That market is one thing, but it does boil down to us individually feeling like the time is right. That’s how, that’s how you get there. You’ve got to remind, you always do remind everybody that this is a zero-sum game. Any dollar one player gets is a dollar another one doesn’t get. This is a [salary] cap on those dollars. They’re like scholarships. If you could spend five scholarships in college and you had 60 to give, you could spend five to get one and then one on one player, then you would run out of scholarships to get the very top one. And you’d have lesser players. Financially, it is not in most cases a matter of the money, it’s a matter of the use of the term money as it relates to the cap. If you can get the most players and the better players out there for the least amount of the cap, you’re doing your very best job. So that’s how it’s looked at. So you sit there at work and you certainly understand our fans wanting CeeDee in a month ago. Well, we’re fundamentally trying to save some scholarship here for another player [Dak Prescott].”
As far as Jones’ scholarship room (the NFL’s salary cap), he has $39.6 million in effective cap space to work with in 2025, per OverTheCap.com, the 12th-most in the league. The outlook is much rosier in 2026 with Dallas possessing a projected $160.1 million to play with in 2026, according to OverTheCap.com. That ranks as the seventh-most in the NFL. Should Jones get creative with Prescott’s contractual structure, there is a resolution to be had between the two parties.
All that’s left now is, to quote Lamb, “get this under control and kill the speculation” by Jones coming together with Prescott in the same way he did with Lamb. The clock is ticking.
