Russini: Cowboys, Prescott haggling over years in new contract, not money

It’s not the money. It’s the time.

That’s the take from The Athletic NFL insider Dianna Russini on where things stand with quarterback Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys.

The two sides have just a few days until their season opener in Cleveland, but they have no binding contract beyond the 2024 campaign. The runner-up in last year’s MVP race is expected to be in line for a new deal that will put him in the neighborhood of $60 million per year, but the front office has repeatedly said they’re in no hurry to make that official.

According to Russini, though, speaking on the latest episode of the Scoop City podcast with cohost Chase Daniel, it’s not that gaudy dollar figure that’s gumming up the works:

“The holdup at this point, from what I understand, is about the years the Dallas Cowboys are willing to commit to. It’s assumed that Dak is going to be paid at the top of the market; the Dallas Cowboys are aware of that. It’s: do they want to put themselves in a position- contractually- that keeps Dak in Dallas longer than two, three, four years? And that’s what Dak is looking for. He’s looking for a long-term commitment from Dallas. The holdup here is really the belief from the Dallas Cowboys.”

Prescott said last week he would like for a deal to be done before Week 1.

“I think it says a lot if it is or if it isn’t,” Prescott said, via ESPN’s Todd Archer.

When asked what exactly it says, his reply was telling: “Just how people feel.”

Team owner Jerry Jones and heir apparent Stephen Jones have said over and over that they do feel Prescott is the guy. But they’ve also dragged their feet on locking him up, comfortable with letting the idea of the 31-year-old wearing a different uniform next year marinate for the entire 2024 offseason.

No one knows what the conversations in the hallways of The Star are really like, but every day Prescott isn’t inked would seem to elevate the risk of alienating and offending him to a point of no return.

And the club even went out late last summer and traded for Trey Lance. Even if that move was truly nothing more than picking up a once-hot property on the cheap to see if the Cowboys can coach him up and flip him for a profit, it didn’t do much to make the quarterback situation any clearer in Dallas.

The team can’t trade Prescott without his approval. They can’t tag him, since they’ve already used that stall tactic twice. They’ll get socked with a $40 million dead cap hit if they let Prescott hit free agency and sign with another team. And they have no quarterbacks at all under contract for 2025.

Russini said she’s never seen a quarterback with as much leverage as Prescott has right now over the Cowboys.

The Cowboys are coming off the first three-year stretch of 12-win seasons in the franchise’s history. But they inexplicably find themselves in a high-stakes game of chicken with the guy who, over that same span, won 31 games for them, more than all but three passers in the sport.

“This is a guy who’s won a lot of games, but is that enough? Winning’s not enough for Jerry Jones. We know this. They want to do more,” Russini pointed out. “They don’t want to just be the team that wins a lot of games; they want to be the team that can play in the Super Bowl.”

It remains to be seen if Jones will make Prescott actually prove he can do that in his final contract year before he gets out his checkbook.

But it may not even be about the payday. If Russini’s report is correct, what the 10th-year signal-caller really wants is a commitment that- like Roger Staubach, Troy Aikman, and Tony Romo before him- he’ll be the face of America’s Team for the duration of his career… and therefore inextricably linked to the Dallas Cowboys for the rest of his life.