Dak Prescott is getting paid. Handsomely, resoundingly, deservedly. In the negotiation stakes, the four-year, $160 million deal he is reportedly set to receive from the Dallas Cowboys was a monumental win. It represented the most glorious kind of gamble, one where an athlete backs themselves and it pays off. Game, set and match. Yet now comes a new game, the type of which Prescott hasn’t seen in his National Football League career to this point. For the old story was this: a fourth-round draft pick made good, a fearless youngster outstripping what even his own team thought he could blossom into. An organization, remember, that had numerous other QBs ahead of him on their draft board back in 2016. It is wrong to say that within the confines of such a tale, Prescott couldn’t lose. Quarterbacks can always lose, because the NFL’s craving for success means patience with them is painfully thin and margins of error are irrepressibly squeezed. Yet in Prescott’s case, making a yearly average of less than $700,000 is going to feel like spectacular value, and it did. Even last year, a franchise tag of $31.4 million seemed cheap(ish) in the current fiscal marketplace, as Prescott threw for 1,856 yards and had 12 total touchdowns before suffering an ankle injury in Week 5 that ended his season. Now the perception is different. The parameters of judgment are different. The expectation is far, far different. Now Prescott, who will collect $42 million in each of the next three campaigns, is the architect of a fresh narrative and the recipient of all the pressures that come beside it. His story is no longer the underdog tale. It is a triumphant plot, of how a 27-year-old quarterback stood up to the most powerful franchise in sports and made it cave to his demands. Yet the triumph comes with a price of its own. “I am a lifelong Cowboy fan and I raised the kid a Cowboy fan,” Prescott’s father, Nat, told the Dallas Morning News. “At five years old he told me he will be a quarterback for the Cowboys. I don’t think God gives you those types of gifts to make them incomplete.” Yeah, there is still plenty of heartwarming stuff to consider with Prescott. But let’s not pretend the enormous contract, agreed just before another franchise tag year would have kicked in, doesn’t come with a new sense of feeling attached that will be novel to him. It can be argued that quarterbacking the Cowboys brings enough pressure in itself, yet this is far from the same. Becoming the second highest-paid player in football means he is being salaried for a level of performance approaching that of Patrick Mahomes, who has won one Super Bowl, reached another and lives permanently in the MVP discussion space. Prescott and his advisors used leverage and guile and flat-out bravado to get to this point and it landed him a paycheck that’s higher than Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, Deshaun Watson and, next year, $17 million more than Tom Brady. So, the talk changes. It is no longer the story of a young talent still learning and growing, but of an established superstar and whether all that money was worth it. Judging players by their price tag isn’t entirely fair and there is a lot more nuance that goes into it than simple cash figures. But that’s the way things are, within the sport, among the audience and surrounding human nature. Soon enough, $40 million a year averages will be the standard for no-more-than-decent quarterbacks. But for now, such a sum comes with the expectation of getting to a Super Bowl, or darn near it. “It is as good a deal as Prescott ever could have hoped for, an incredible deal for a player coming off a serious injury that limited him to five games and an extraordinary victory for agent Todd France, who got his quarterback client to play the waiting game to perfection,” wrote Tim Cowlishaw in the Dallas Morning News. “It’s a win for the Cowboys only in that it gets the seemingly endless Dak contract talks off the front-burner for a few years.” The fact that the Prescott commitment has put the Cowboys in a tougher spot than they needed to be – they could have had him at $30 million annually two years ago but wanted to wait and see – actually only serves to tighten the screw on the player somewhat. Though the structuring of his deal allows some salary cap relief it is still a squeeze. When you’re allocating $160 million to one guy there is a limit to what other moves you can make during those coming years. Dallas needs Prescott to be worth every penny of what they’re paying him, or somehow worth even more, if a route out of this growing stretch of barren years is to be a realistic possibility. “For the Cowboys, coming a game shy of the Super Bowl would be a success, because they haven’t done that in a quarter century,” FS1’s Nick Wright said on First Things First. “What this guarantees is they do not enter the QB wilderness, which they were in between (Troy) Aikman and (Tony) Romo, for the better part of 15 years.” Prescott’s exploits will now be analyzed through a whole other set of specifics. Even those gaudy numbers that came in the opening weeks of 2020 – 450, 472 and 502 yards passing in consecutive games – might not be enough. The Cowboys, who have neither won it all nor gotten particularly close in a generation and counting, still judge their quarterbacks by their ability to win. Owner Jerry Jones, after a couple of years of bungled contract games, has finally paid for the right to hold that expectation. Prescott played his hand perfectly in negotiating and up to here, he’s been everything the Cowboys could have asked for. Now, they’ll need him to be even more than that. Here’s what others have said … Dan Wetzel, Yahoo Sports: “The good news is a deal got done, because Dallas was done without it. Good for Prescott, who went from fourth-round draft steal to (depending on how you calculate it) the highest-paid quarterback in the league. And good for Jones, who acknowledged his mistakes, overcame his famed stubbornness and moved forward with what’s best for the franchise. The bad news? Now the hard part begins. For both sides.” Danny Heifetz, The Ringer: “(Dak) Prescott bet on himself and won. But just as importantly, the Cowboys bet their starting quarterback would fold, and the team lost. Other teams should see this as a lesson that reaffirms what they already knew: Don’t let your quarterbacks get anywhere near the door.” Shannon Sharpe, Undisputed: “The Cowboys should be favored because if you look at them, they have the best QB in the division. But their defense causes me some concern. As of now because they re-signed Dak, I’m taking the Cowboys.” |
