Blogging The Boys
Another quarterback contract-shaped leaf just fell around the Dallas Cowboys.
The first song of the popular Broadway show Dear Evan Hansen is called “Anybody Have a Map?” and is sung through a bit of chaos throughout the unfolding scene.
We are not quite in the middle of chaos, but allow me to ask a similar question.
Does anybody have a rake?
Thursday afternoon saw a leaf fall and this one is shaped like a quarterback contract. The Jacksonville Jaguars locked down Trevor Lawrence to a new deal, one that sees him reach $55M per year. This was the bar that Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow set a year ago.
Bypassing the argument of whether or not Dak Prescott is worth this or that, we’ll go on an assumption that the Cowboys believe Prescott is worth signing to a new deal. If we assume/believe/whatever-you-want-to-say this is the case, then there is no question that waiting and dragging the process out is costing them money. We can debate whether Lawrence is better than Prescott, but does anybody believe Lawrence is better than Joe Burrow to use the bar he just reached? Of course not, for those who want to have arguments in that way.
Did that matter, though? Did Trevor Lawrence objectively being “not as good” as Joe Burrow hinder him in this way? Did Lawrence not match Burrow on an average annual value basis? Obviously none of it mattered because the market is the market and this is a supply and demand world. If you want a franchise quarterback and are dealing with one capable of working the market to their advantage then you are going to have to pay market rate.
The Cowboys may very well believe that for all we know, but not coming to terms with Prescott is seeing numbers rise and rise and rise (although one writer here at BTB believes this to be inconsequential relative to the bigger picture).
Even if you are someone who does not want the team to sign Dak Prescott to an extension, if they are going to do it anyway then do you’d probably agree that waiting like this is bad business. Perhaps the people who believe they are going to let him walk are right, but if Dallas winds up getting a deal done they will in all likelihood make Prescott the highest-paid player in NFL history. To be clear they would have had to have done that had they gotten a deal done at an earlier point, but that bar would have been lower than it is right now.
