Cowboys agree to pay Prescott richest deal in club’s history
The Dallas Cowboys and Dak Prescott have finally agreed on the richest contract in club history, two years after negotiations first started with the star quarterback.
The team said the agreement was reached Monday. It’s a $160 million, four-year contract with $126 million guaranteed and an NFL-record $66 million signing bonus, according to a person with knowledge of the deal who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because details weren’t announced.
The deal comes a day before a deadline to put the franchise tag on Prescott for a second straight year at a salary cap charge of $37.7 million. The new contract will lower that cap hit.
Prescott played on a $31.4 million franchise tag in 2020 before his season ended with a compound fracture and dislocation of his right ankle in Week 5.
At $40 million per season, Prescott is second in the NFL in
annual salary to Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes, who is at $45 million annually in a $450 million, 10year deal that could eventually exceed $500 million in value. Houston’s Deshaun Watson is third at $39 million annually. JUDGE TOSSES SUIT OVER ‘RACE-NORMING’ >> A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that challenged “race-norming” in dementia tests for retired NFL players, a practice that some say makes it harder for Black athletes to qualify for awards that average more than $500,000.
A hearing had been set for Thursday. The judge instead ordered the NFL and the lead lawyer in the overall $1 billion settlement to resolve the issue through mediation. That process would appear to exclude the Black players who sued.
“We are deeply concerned that the Court’s proposed solution is to order the very parties who created this discriminatory system to negotiate a fix,” said lawyer Cyril V. Smith, who represents ex-players Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport. “The class of Black former players whom we represent must have a seat at the table and a transparent process.”
The demographic factors that doctors consider during testing for dementia often include race. If so, lawyers say, the testing assumes that Black athletes start with worse cognitive functioning than white people — which means it’s harder for them to show a deficit. Both Henry and Davenport were denied awards but would have qualified had they been white, according to their lawsuit.
MLB
CORMIER, PITCHED IN 1988,
‘08 OLYMPICS, DIES AT 53 >> Rheal Cormier, the durable
left-hander who spent 16 seasons in the majors and remarkably pitched in the Olympics before and after his time in the big leagues, died Monday. He was 53.
The Philadelphia Phillies said Cormier died of cancer at his home in New Brunswick, Canada.
Cormier owned a neat nook in Phillies history: He was the winning pitcher in the final game that Philadelphia won at Veterans Stadium in 2003, and also was the winner in the first game the Phils won after moving into Citizens Bank Park in 2004.
College football
MILES OUT AT KANSAS >> Les Miles is out as Kansas’ head coach just days after he was placed on administrative leave amid sexual misconduct allegations from his tenure at LSU.
Kansas announced Miles’ departure, describing it as a mutual agreement to part ways.
Last week, LSU released
a 148-page review by a law firm about the university’s handling of sexual misconduct complaints. It described how Miles “tried to sexualize the staff of student workers in the football program by, for instance, allegedly demanding that he wanted blondes with big breasts, and ‘pretty girls.’”
The report also revealed then-LSU athletic director Joe Alleva recommended firing Miles in 2013 to university officials. Kansas placed miles on leave later that day and said it would conduct a review of allegations against Miles that it had been unaware of.
Men’s basketball
GONZAGA REMAINS NO. 1 >> Gonzaga’s bid to go wireto-wire No. 1 is in its final week. The Zags received 61 of 63 first-place votes from a media panel in The Associated Press men’s college basketball poll as they attempt to become the first wire-to-wire No. 1 since Kentucky in 2014-15.
BERLIN >> Eager to deliver hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses that have been piling up, Germany has begun ramping up its use of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine after authorities said it could be safely given to people age 65 and over.
The doses have been gathering dust in storage in recent weeks because of German restrictions on who could get the vaccine and misgivings among some who were eligible. Germany has received 2.1 million doses of the AstraZeneca shot so far, but administered just 721,000, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
Last week, Germany’s independent vaccine committee said new data showed the AstraZeneca vaccine was effective in older people too, prompting a swift changes of rules by the government, which has come under criticism for its slow vaccination rollout compared to Britain and the United States.
Authorities in Berlin in opened a sixth large vaccination center at the disused Tempelhof Airport in the heart of the capital Monday that will administer only the AstraZeneca vaccine. Starting with 200 appointments, operators hope to rapidly scale up to as many as 3,300 shots a day beginning March 23.
Some general practitioners in Berlin will also begin vaccinating people with chronic conditions this week, according to the city’s top health official, Dilek Kalayci.
Finance Minister Olaf Scholz told public broadcaster ZDF that he expects Germany to be able to administer up to 10 million shots a week by the end of the month. That would be twice as many as Germany
has managed to do since vaccinations started at the end of December.
Around 2.5 million people in Germany — about 3% of the population — have so far received the two shots needed for the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines.
The push to vaccinate faster comes as Germany takes further steps out of lockdown this week, with more students returning to school and some businesses, museums and zoos reopening, albeit only for those who booked appointments in advance.
Among the first to get the vaccine at the new Tempelhof site were many health workers, teachers and police officers.
Silvia Firat, who works in elderly care, said she had initial misgivings about the AstraZeneca vaccine after hearing that some had strong reactions to it. But when Firat got an invitation, she chose to go ahead with it, partly to set an example.
“I can only recommend doing it,” the 40-year-old said. “Every injection we get has some side effects, some more, some less.”
Germany has seen over 72,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began. Its disease control agency reported 5,011 newly confirmed
cases overnight and 34 more deaths.
Thomas Mertens, who heads Germany’s independent vaccine advisory panel STIKO, insisted that any suggestions that authorities revised the age limit for the AstraZeneca vaccine due to political pressure were “not correct, absolutely not correct.”
Mertens told The Associated Press that his panel had never meant to cast doubt on the vaccine, but rather considered the data that AstraZeneca had originally submitted for people over 65 to be “insufficient.”
Additional analyses provided by the company and released by health authorities in England and Scotland prompted STIKO to lift the age limit for the vaccine last week, he said, noting that other countries in Europe had taken a similar approach.
Germany’s minister for families said she was optimistic that the rate of vaccinations in the country will increase steeply soon.
“We will have a completely different discussion in a few weeks,” the minister, Franziska Giffey, told The Associated Press. “Not a discussion about a lack of vaccines, but instead the discussion will be about how we can ensure that all available vaccines are actually used.”