7 Cowboys whose contracts must be reworked, restructured, or extended in 2024
With the end of the regular season occurring over the next 72 hours, 18 teams are going to be closing up shop for the year. Technically contracts across the league don’t expire until the start of the new year, but for all intents and purposes, the season is over when it comes to the bulk of the majority of player contracts. There are several players who have playoff incentives tied to their base salaries, but those base salaries are paid across the 18 weeks of the regular season. A playoff share is spread across rosters based on how far each team goes.
For the Dallas Cowboys, this technically means that it’s time to start examining the contract situation they will face in 2024. We’ve already covered the teams long list of impact free agents. This happens annually with Dallas as they are a team that has done an excellent job of acquiring talent through the draft. Now, let’s look at the players who are currently under contract for 2024, but where their current salary isn’t ideal.
This is a two-way street. Some players are well deserving of an extension while others either have too big of a cap hit or make too little of an impact to be paid they way they are supposed to be. Check out the seven players who will need to have some things adjusted before the free agency frenzy of early March.
Prescott
Gallup
Lamb
Zack
Diggs
Tank
Micah
QB Dak Prescott
2024 Base Salary: $29 million
2024 Cap Hit: $59.46 million
Contract Runs Through: 2024
Technically Prescott’s deal runs through 2026, but the final two years are voided and just placeholders for cap-hit allocations of bonus money already paid him.
Prescott famously negotiated a short, four-year deal in 2021 that included both a no-trade clause and a no-tag clause. He’s totally in the driver seat, and then went out an steered the club with an MVP-worthy campaign.
The $60 million cap hit and the clauses demand the team get to the negotiating table this spring.
It’s actually a great year for this to happen as Tua Tagovailoa is the only other premier QB in need of a new deal, so the constant escalation of the market won’t be a race this spring.
Expect Prescott to clear Joe Burrow’s league-high numbers of $55 million average salary and $146 million in fully-guaranteed dough. The football world doesn’t acknowledge Deshaun Watson’s deal.
OG Zack Martin
2024 Base Salary: $18 million
2024 Cap Hit: $28.5 million
Contract Runs Through: 2024
Like Prescott, Martin has void years, except he has three of them. It would be nice and tiny for the Cowboys to extend Martin, who held out this past offseason in order to fully guarantee his 2023 and 2024 salaries. He seems to have slowed down a bit, allowing a career-high four sacks after zero in 2022, and his run blocking isn’t as up to par as it’s used to.
Is he slowing down, or did the change in OL coach set him and the rest of the OL back? Either way, he’s still one of the best in the league and he should be a Cowboy for life. A two-year extension makes a ton of sense.
DE DeMarcus Lawrence
WR CeeDee Lamb
2024 Base Salary: $17.99 million
2024 Cap Hit: $17.99 million
Contract Runs Through: 2024
Lamb is finishing up his fourth professional season with a bang as he’s likely to finish as the receptions leader and more than likely the receiving yardage leader as well. He’s set the franchise record for both. He’s clearly the No. 1 receiver the Cowboys didn’t feel they had in Amari Cooper and the team should work to give him a long-term deal that will create a ton of cap room for this coming season.
We’ll dive into the specifics of what a deal should look like in the offseason, but this one seems pretty easy. Five year, $155 million with $55 million fully guaranteed will top Tyreek Hill’s number.
CB Trevon Diggs
2024 Base Salary: $11 million
2024 Cap Hit: $16.25 million
Contract Runs Through: 2028
This is just an accounting thing after Diggs signed his new five-year deal in the offseason. The Cowboys will restructure Diggs’ base salary to create some cap space, spreading around $10 million across each of the final five years, creating around $8 million of cap space in 2024.
WR Michael Gallup
2024 Base Salary: $8.5 million
2024 Cap Hit: $13.85 million
Contract Runs Through: 2026
The Cowboys gave Gallup a two-year extension wrapped in a five-year deal back in 2022. It wasn’t ideal at the time and they haven’t reaped the rewards. Gallup just never recovered from the leg injury of 2021 and is now an afterthought in a potent offense.
He is a great guy and a great teammate by all accounts, but he hasn’t had over 500 receiving yards or 40 catches (unless there’s a Week 18 explosion) over the last three seasons.
Cutting Gallup will only save $800,000 off the 2024 books, but it clears him completely off the books for 2025. Another alternative would be to June-1 rule Gallup, which would save them $8.5 million in cap space next season and leave $8.7 million of dead money on the 2025 ledger (for a savings of $7.15 million from his projected cap hit).
LB Micah Parsons
2024 Base Salary: $2.99 million
2024 Cap Hit: $5.43 million
Contract Runs Through: 2024
The Cowboys will finally be under the gun with Parsons’ contract situation. Teams cannot renegotiate a player’s contract until they’ve been in the league three years. In three seasons, Parsons has now made three Pro Bowls and is in constant conversation for the best defender in the league.
As a former first-round pick, the Cowboys have the option to place the fifth-year option on Parsons this spring. It will run around $20.2 million for 2025 and start a two-year negotiating window.
It would behoove Stephen Jones not to take the entire two years and ink Parsons to the largest deal for a defender, make it go beyond five years so that there are multiple restructure triggers to pull to help lessen the cap impact over the first three seasons of the pact.
