It's very easy to poke fun at the Dallas Cowboys and quarterback Dak Prescott for having failed to progress in the postseason, but the constant hand-wringing and complaining about his contract doesn't have as much weight behind it as many believe.
The Cowboys are all-in on Prescott, as they agreed to a four-year, $240 million contract with him following his past success. That is the type of contract that is instantly going to make any Cowboys hater green with envy when Prescott doesn't end world hunger or solve one of the Millennium Prize Problems every single week.
Bleacher Report appears to have joined that chorus, naming Prescott as the second-worst contract in all of football, standing behind one of the worst deals in all of sports history in the five-year deal handed out to Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson.
What a moronic decision by the Cowboys! How dare they try to sign someone who was a few ticks away from winning an MVP in 2023 to a contract that gives them stability at the sport's most important position, all while the division gets tougher around them!
Cowboys' Dak Prescott contract called second-worst in NFL
Prescott may have had a down year in 2024 before he got hurt, and his injury certainly didn't make things any easier for him. However, unless the Cowboys are going to reboot everything, there was no justification for choosing not to pay one of the more consistent quarterbacks in the league.
To say that Prescott has a worse deal than Tua Tagovailoa, who Prescott is better than and who has an even more concerning injury history, is absurd. Sure, Prescott's MVP days might be behind him, but he's still a Top 10 quarterback, and he needs to be compensated as such.
As shown last year, Dallas is nowhere near a respectable playoff threat without Prescott. Making him a $60 million man might seem egregious, but the going rate for elite quarterbacks keeps going up. The Cowboys would be mocked just as vociferously if they let Prescott leave without an ironclad high-end replacement who could come in to replace them.
Cowboys fans would obviously love to have more than two playoff wins in the Prescott era, but to put all the blame on him and his gigantic contract for those shortcomings is not giving equal service to all of the other myriad issues that have helped turn Prescott's Cowboys career into what it has become.