What’s going on with Dak Prescott's contract? | Inside Coverage
Yahoo Sports' Jason Fitz and Jori Epstein dive into the potential reasons behind the delay in Dak's contract talks. Hear the full conversation on “Inside Coverage” - part of the “Zero Blitz” podcast - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
JASON FITZ: I'm trying to figure out what's going on with Dak because as I was driving around this week, I heard some people saying, look, if this was simple, it would already be done-- Dak going into the last year of a deal, everybody trying to figure out if the Cowboys are going to try and reduce his massive cap number. Like, what is the sense right now that you have on what's going on in Dallas?
JORI EPSTEIN: On one hand, Dak's $59 million cap hit is a little bit prohibitive. On the other hand, it's not as prohibitive anymore. The salary cap rose by over $30 million this year, which is above the projection of every single exec in the league I talked to.
Now, when I mentioned this to a Cowboys person, they were like, yeah, but we were thinking $15 million. So it's more like $15 million extra than $30 million extra. But it still is extra.
So think of this more as, what if they were to take a $40 million cap hit or a $30-something million cap hit? Like, that's really, if we're trying to compare apples to apples, what is going on here. And so I think they have more flexibility in this particular year than you do most years to take on a cap hit like that.
I'm getting that CeeDee Lamb deal done tomorrow because CeeDee led the league in receptions and was top three in receiving yards and receiving touchdowns. And the market for receivers is only going up. And so I think that the Cowboys tend to have deal inertia and often don't get deals done because of it.
And I think that CeeDee Lamb has been everything you could want. And you need more receivers than you do quarterbacks. And they're less expensive than quarterbacks. And so to me, while we're all talking about this Dak contract, and it could get done next week, it could get done next year, I think that--
I mean, the Cowboys and Dak's representative did not meet in Indy about a deal. I think that, from what I was hearing from front office and agent people, seemed to be, like, kind of standard about the Cowboys, is like, they just were not making-- they didn't have a lot of momentum on deals. And people were a little confused about that. But I think in particular, that deal, I'm like, get CeeDee done. And then see what you want to do with Dak.
JASON FITZ: Like, CeeDee's great. And I don't take anything away from that. Epic receivers come around a bunch. Quality starting quarterbacks don't, right?
So like, now, to your point, you've got to have something better lined up. I still believe that if Dak hit the open market today, there'd be a laundry list of teams that would look around and say, yep, we'll pay him. Whatever it takes, we'll pay him because Dak is better than what we got. There's a laundry list of people that would overpay to bring Dak in.
And if you're the Cowboys, you've got to understand that, like, one man's trash is another man's treasure. The fact that there are so many teams that would fall over themselves to get Dak while you're sitting here saying, well, I don't know if we've really got the guy-- OK, you know what's worse than Dak? Going into this year's draft realizing you're picking in the middle of the first round, and you're not going to have a shot at one of the top five quarterbacks in this year's draft.
Like, I think the hardest thing to do when you're a team is deal with what happens when you have a pretty good or very good quarterback that's maybe not a Hall of Fame quarterback. Because that guy's going to get paid. He's going to get contracts. Fans are going to start to hate him because he's not Mahomes. Like, this is just the cycle every team that has a very good quarterback that may not be Hall of Fame-caliber goes through.