QB strategy
Cowboys bet big on Dak Prescott; Eagles want to help Jalen Hurts
What is great for Dak Prescott may turn out to be good for the Eagles. It seems silly, or at least not so obvious, to say that today, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
The Dallas Cowboys have reportedly signed Prescott to a four-year contract extension that could top out at $160 million and that fully guarantees him $95 million. Depending on how one wishes to parse the numbers and dollars, the contract can reasonably be called the best and most lucrative of any NFL player, and Prescott can still become a free agent after the 2024 season, when he will be just 31. Assuming Prescott recovers fully from the right ankle dislocation and compound fracture that he suffered last October, the Cowboys for the next four years will likely be better and more settled at football’s most important position than any NFC East team.
Then we have the Eagles, who not long ago traded away the player they thought would be their franchise quarterback, Carson Wentz. Now their owner, Jeffrey Lurie, is making it known, through media intermediaries, that he wants the organization – i.e., player-personnel chief Howie Roseman and neophyte head coach Nick Sirianni – to focus on helping Jalen Hurts develop into more than the cost-effective backup he was drafted to be.
Those two situations couldn’t be more disparate, and the Cowboys’ seems so much the better when one remembers that Wentz will occupy $33.6 million worth of salarycap space for the Eagles this season, even though he doesn’t play for them anymore.
But Wentz’s dead-cap hit will stay on the Eagles’ books for just that one year. Once that albatross is gone, everyone could see, between these two franchises, the clash of team-building approaches that could define the NFL’S future. It’s the clash between the franchises who think they’re smart to sign their quarterbacks to gigantic contracts and the franchises who think they’re smart not to.
The cost of overpaying for competence
The most interesting part about the reaction to and analysis of Prescott’s contract, among those who play in, played in, or cover the NFL, is the uniformity of it all. Everyone agrees that Prescott made out huge here, and they’re right: He did. In an ironic twist, his horrible ankle injury actually benefited him in these negotiations. The Cowboys went 6-10 last season, saw what they were without Prescott, and decided they didn’t want to go through it again. And because so many analysts are themselves former players and executives, they view the signing through the respective prisms of their experiences. An ex-player, all things being equal, is more likely to say: Awesome for Dak. He read the market and maximized his value. That’s what every player should do if he can. An ex-exec, all things being equal, is more likely to say: Awesome for Dak. Now let’s see how the next four years go.
There’s a reason to maintain that measure of prudence and restraint when evaluating what the Cowboys did here, and that reason has nothing to do with Prescott in and of himself. He is a terrific leader and a solid-to-excellent passer; worse quarterbacks have reached and won Super Bowls. But he is not among the NFL’S two or three top quarterbacks, and the Cowboys are now paying him as if he were. In a sense, they – and by “they,” we mean Jerry Jones here – have to pay Prescott as if he were the best quarterback in the league, because the Cowboys, like it or not, are the NFL’S crown-jewel franchise. They are always relevant, and whether manned by Troy Aikman or Tony Romo or Prescott, the position itself — starting quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys — is a glamorous one in American sports.
From a pure football perspective, though, the decision to bet big on Prescott, or any quarterback, has ramifications, sometimes unpredictable ones. (Just ask the Eagles.) Prescott’s cap number, according to the database Overthecap.com, increases each year of his contract, from $22.2 million this season to $33.2 in 2022 to $44.2 million in 2023 to $47.2 million in 2024. Now, once vaccines are more widely available and the pandemic’s effects on the economy subside and the NFL inks a new television deal, the surge in revenue could raise the salary cap yet again.
But even if the cap escalates, Prescott will take up a significant portion of it for the Cowboys, giving them less financial resources to allocate to the roster around him. They weren’t exactly a dynasty when
he was on his rookie contract, either: Over those four years, when Prescott started all 64 of their regular-season games and never counted more than $2.1 million against the cap, the Cowboys reached the playoffs twice and won one postseason game.
Spending smarter
Meanwhile, Hurts will cost the Eagles no more than $1.9 million against the cap in any of the next three seasons. As much as Howie Roseman has struggled to replenish the Eagles' talent pool through the draft, he constructed a championship team in a year when the franchise used minimal cap space on its quarterbacks because he spent that money elsewhere and was smart in how he did it.
There should be a lesson for the Eagles there if they care to learn it. For his 27 years in charge of the Eagles, Lurie has bought into the common strategy of finding a quarterback, designating him the franchise centerpiece, and paying him a lot for a long time. But that strategy just led to one of the most embarrassing episodes in franchise history – the Eagles traded Wentz before the extension to which they signed him even kicked in – and there's no reason Lurie has to stick to it. The Cowboys made their move. Now it's the Eagles' turn. May the best plan win.