There aren’t any indications that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones wants to move on from Dak Prescott. But if he changes his mind in the not-so-distant future, there will be a manageable way out of that contract.
After playing the 2020 season under the franchise tag, Prescott and the Cowboys agreed to a four-year contract extension worth $160 million in 2021. The current deal keeps him under team control through the 2024 campaign.
In his latest column, ESPN’s Dan Graziano looked at the contract statuses for multiple big-named NFL quarterbacks. In the piece, Graziano detailed how the Cowboys could theoretically get out of Prescott’s current deal without taking a huge dead money hit:
“Dak is sure to be the Cowboys’ starter for at least one more year after this one and probably much longer, as they’ll likely look to extend him this offseason or next. But if things were to go wrong, the 2024 season is when the Cowboys would have a relatively easy out.
Moving on from Dak in the 2024 offseason would cost them no cash, and about $40 million in dead-money cap charges for 2024. But Dak’s only 29, and they love him there, so things would have to go very wrong for any of this to matter. Just pointing out that this extension, which feels so recent, was a short-term deal designed to get him to the market again sooner, or prompt a decision by Dallas on an extension in the next year or two.