Dak Prescott Offered $105 Million Guaranteed, But That Word Has Distinctions in the NFL

Dak Prescott has been offered a contract from the Dallas Cowboys worth an average of $33 million per year with $105 million guaranteed, Calvin Watkins reports in the Dallas Morning News. It sounds like a slam dunk deal for Prescott's side, but there's gotta be a reason he has yet to sign on the dotted line.

The distinction here is that the word "guaranteed" in NFL reporting does not differentiate between fully guaranteed at signing and the more common application in reporting of these numbers which is the amount of money guaranteed if he suffers a catastrophic injury. To be sure, the latter is valuable in the violent sport of football, but when the general public hears the word "guaranteed" they think it means the former. Mike Florio delves into some of the other distinctions on past QB deals about whether you can say this offer is a record or not.

Functionally, my estimate from the outside is that the sticking point in getting this deal done is that Prescott essentially has two years fully guaranteed with the third guaranteed for injury, and wants more full guarantees. No one really knows the true sticking point other than Jerry Jones, Stephen Jones, Dak Prescott, and Prescott's agent.

This is a tricky spot for both sides. Prescott is in that weird gray area where he is an above average NFL starter, but also not in the elite category of being in the top 6 or 8 or arguably even 10 quarterbacks in the league. The Cowboys, in rolling the dice, wouldn't necessarily expect to replace him with someone better, but that's a possibility.

The leverage Prescott has is that new coach Mike McCarthy wants to install his new offense, so getting the quarterback in the building as early as possible for offseason activities is paramount. We'll see what happens and when with this deal, including the possibility that Prescott is hit with the franchise tag and we go through this all again for the next year.