Dallas City News

In case you missed it, the Cowboys have a few star players waiting on new contracts. Training camp may be under way in Oxnard, but the story that’s consumed much of the offseason – the contract statuses of Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, and Micah Parsons – has continued to rage on.

The first day of camp brought plenty of attention to the conundrum, as everyone had plenty of questions for Jerry and Stephen Jones. The two men in charge gave mostly the same type of answer they’ve given all offseason, only with a few more words:

The main talking points from the Joneses boiled down to the same old same old: the salary cap makes it difficult, and having three star players all wanting to be paid top-market at the same time is very challenging. Jerry Jones even went out of his way to say that signing these three players right now may mean little to nothing left to field a whole team.

Others have countered these arguments. Jason Fitzgerald of Over the Cap spelled out one major reason why the Cowboys are separate from most of the rest of the NFL as it relates to roster building.

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.

Sheil Kapadia of The Ringer succinctly outlines the logical inconsistencies below:

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.