Are the Dallas Cowboys quickly running out of salary cap space?

Ideally, the Cowboys, following their strategy of signing foundational players after their third season, would have signed quarterback Dak Prescott before Lawrence. Not only has Dak earned a significant raise after outplaying the terms of his rookie contract, he plays the most important position on the team.

Quarterback salaries have exploded since the new Collective Bargaining Agreement began in August 2011. Check out my tweet to see how the top 10 quarterback salary cap percentages have increased by 25 percent in the last seven years.

You better read that again. The salary cap percentage allotted to the top 10 quarterbacks has increased by nearly 25 percent. In terms of dollars, this means a raise from just over $15 million to $27.5 million or an 83 percent increase in salary. For comparison, the average US workers wage growth has only gone up by 20 percent over a similar time period.

Compounding the problem, quarterback Russell Wilson from the Seattle Seahawks signed a four-year $140 million extension on April 15. Dallas needed to make the first quarterback signing in the 2019 offseason and should have prioritized signing Prescott immediately after the new league year opened on March 13th at 4:00 PM New York time.

The 2018 signed quarterback contracts of interest for Aaron Rodgers, Matt Ryan, Kirk Cousins, Jimmy Garoppolo and Drew Brees averaged $28.5 million per year. Dallas could have conceivably started with a fair market contract value ceiling of $28 million.

I presented the case why I think Prescott should make a strategic decision and sign a less than fair market contract last week. This is an important step in the process because Prescott’s contract would be the model the Front Office could have tabled in all upcoming contracts.

With Prescott signed, ideally with a strategically below market contract, the Cowboys could turn their attention to Lawrence. Instead of signing a contract that will be extremely hard for Lawrence to deliver value to the Cowboys as per a Nobel prize-winning economist, he could have been coaxed, following Prescott’s example, into an $18 million average per year deal.

If Lawrence was adamant that he wanted fair market value, the Cowboys Front Office should have considered trading him to a willing participant like the Kansas City Chiefs who gave a 2019 first round draft pick and a 2020 second round draft pick for a lessor player in defensive lineman Frank Clark.

While Cowboys owner Jerry Jones wanted his War Daddy pass rusher, trading his war daddy would have sent a strong message to all players with contracts pending that they could face similar scenarios and be traded from state income tax-free Texas.