Why drafting well is key for Cowboys to pay and keep Prescott, Lamb, and Parsons

The Cowboys are clearly looking to be efficient from a cost-saving perspective.

At some point over the next 12 months, the Cowboys will hand out top-of-the-market contracts to Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, and Micah Parsons.

Prescott will likely get something upward of the $55 million Average Annual Value (AAV) Joe Burrow got last year, Lamb will look to better Amon-Ra St. Brown’s recent contract ($30 million AAV), and making Parsons the highest-paid defensive player in the league will probably cost $35 million in AAV (Joey Bosa is currently at $34 million).

That’s a lot of money for just three players and has got to have you wondering about how many top-of-market contracts you can hand out on a single team.

To answer that, you first need to figure out which positions/players you want to hand those big contracts to, and you’d likely start with your “Money 5” positions, or as Aditi Kinkhabwala of NFL Network once phrased it:

• First you pay the guy who throws [QB]
• Then the guy that chases the guy who throws [DE]
• Then the guy who catches the ball thrown best [WR]
• Then the guy who covers the guy catching the ball best [CB]
• Then the guy who blocks for the guy throwing [LT]

If we build such a Money 5 roster and assign each player the franchise tag value, this is what you’d pay for your top 5 guys this year:

The franchise numbers for your Money 5 add up to 49% of this year’s salary cap. And if you factor in that the franchise tag is a lagging indicator (it’s calculated using the five largest salaries in the prior year), you’re probably going to spend more than 50% of your cap on your top five players – if you’re paying competitive rates, and especially if you have a contract extension for your QB coming up.

Let’s extend that to your top 10 players. If you’re a team like the Cowboys, with a focus on offense, you’re going to want some more offensive players in your top 10, so add a second offensive lineman and a second wide receiver, and – much to the chagrin of many – a running back. Two spots left; those will go to the defense. You’ll probably want a second DE, and your last spot goes to a DT. This is what your team now looks like, and how it has evolved from 2022 to 2025:

So you now have a team where the top 10 guys cost 86% to 87% of your salary cap and possibly up to 89% of your cap in 2025 (though the 2025 numbers are just estimates from OvertheCap.com and could of course still change).

In any case, it’s obvious that you can’t build an NFL roster if you pay your top 10 guys top-of-the-market rates. You’d have about $20 million left with which to pay 43 additional players, which wouldn’t even work if you paid everybody the rookie minimum.

But if you had four of those top 10 guys playing on their rookie contracts, at say $4 million each instead of the ~$20 franchise tag average, you’d be shaving about $60 million off your cap commitment for your top 10 guys.

That’s the value your top picks are expected to bring to your roster. Because while the draft is nominally all about talent acquisition, there’s no denying that it’s also an integral part of salary cap management. The draft is the perfect vehicle for bringing in talented and cheap labor to replace old and expensive employees.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you’re a team that’s drafting fairly well. You draft one standout player per year on average and you reward that player with a contract extension at a franchise-tag rate once his rookie deal is up. Let’s further assume that the average career of those standout picks is 10 years, so that at any point in time you’ll have 10 such players on your roster. In that ideal world, at any given time, six of your top players would be playing at a franchise-tag rate, four would be playing on their rookie contracts.

And if your rookies fail to live up to expectations, you may have to replace them with much more expensive free agents (if you want to maintain the quality of your roster), which in turn will cut into your cap space and limit your options for the rest of the roster.

Next, we’ll look at how the Cowboys roster, as viewed through this “Top 10” lens, has evolved from 2022 to 2024, and what’s coming in 2025.

To do that, we’ll look at the cap hit for each Top 10 player, but also at the AAV of their contracts. Because the team can move cap charges from year to year the cap number fluctuates a lot, which is why AAV can be a better indicator of how much the Cowboys have committed to their Top 10 positions.

2022

In 2022, the Cowboys found themselves very close to that ideal world described above, where six of their top players were playing on top contracts, while four (CeeDee Lamb, Trevon Diggs, Micah Parsons, Osa Odighizuwa) were still on their rookie contracts.

The combined AAV for the Top 10 is at a moderate 56%, this would have been the year for the team to absorb some of the salary cap hits of their veteran contracts. Instead, the Cowboys pushed money forward, which is why the cap percentage is fairly low at 46%.

2023

Structurally, not much changes in 2023. Mazi Smith replaces Osa Odighizuwa at DT, but since both are on rookie contracts, that’s essentially a wash. Ezekiel Elliott is out, and while Tony Pollard proved to be a little cheaper, playing under the tag meant the Cowboys were still paying top-of-the-market rates for their RB, even if he had a different name.

Both their cap commitment and AAV are almost unchanged versus 2022, and again the cap charge is lower than the AAV, meaning the Cowboys kept pushing cap money forward. Will that come back to bite them? You betcha!

2024

And just like that, the Cowboys are in trouble. Instead of four rookies on cap- and AAV-friendly contracts, they only have two rookies in their Top 10. And the cap hit of the Top 10 ballooned from 44% of the cap in 2023 to 61% in 2024, in part because all the cap money pushed forward suddenly came home to roost: Prescott and Lawrence are in the last year of their deals and all the money pushed forward with restructures must be accounted for now.

Also, CeeDee Lamb is no longer on a rookie contract, but instead playing on the fifth-year option, which also pushes up all the numbers. The Cowboys can create a ton of cap space if they sign Lamb to an extension, but that will once again mean pushing money forward.

Additionally, Tyler Smith should be absorbing some of those numbers with his rookie contract, but the Cowboys are treating themselves to the luxury of having two offensive linemen on top contracts in Martin and Steele.

In this context, it’s not surprising that the team let Tyron Smith walk and decided to save money on the RB position.

And I bet they are praying fervently that Tyler Guyton and either Sam Williams or Marshawn Kneeland turn out to be bona fide Top 10 players for the Cowboys. Because changes are coming in 2025, big changes.

If the Cowboys sign Prescott, Lamb, and Parsons to the contracts outlined above ($55 million, $31 million, $35 million), they’ll need a lot of help in 2025 from their rookie contracts to make it work, and they’ll need to part ways with key veterans.

2025

Unless Zack Martin and DeMarcus Lawrence agree to substantial pay cuts, this is their last season in Dallas. And even Terence Steele is a question mark for me, the Cowboys might be better off from a cap perspective if they trade Steele to a tackle-needy team (and there are many of those).

The problem of course is that all three players come with a significant dead money hit if they leave. Martin has a dead money hit of $26.5 million (making him a June 1 cut would split that into $9.4 million in 2025 and $17.1 million in 2026), Lawrence will cost $7.5 million in dead money, and Steele would hit the books with $9.0 million if he’s traded (but would also create $8 million in cap savings). And they still have Michael Gallup on the books for $8.7 million in 2025.

But that’s not all. Following this Top 10 approach also means the Cowboys will need a WR 2 in 2025 on a rookie contract to replace Brandin Cooks, and they’ll also need a running back on a rookie contract to make the Top 10 approach work. The Cowboys will have to invest their first- and second-round picks in these positions next year.

That’s a tough place to be in, if finances dictate which veterans have to go and which positions you have to draft.

But it’s not like this is a surprise development. The Cowboys drafted Cedee Lamb in 2020, added Micah Parsons in 2021, and also extended Dak Prescott in 2021. By 2022, the Cowboys knew what they had in Lamb and Parsons, and also understood what the Prescott contract meant. Anybody with even a passing knowledge of the cap could have predicted exactly what was going to happen down the line and would have prepared accordingly.

Instead, the Cowboys sat on their hands waiting to “see more leaves fall,” kept pushing money down the line, failed to sign their players to early, cap-friendly extensions, and had the chutzpah to blame the salary cap and an imaginary pie for their own ineptitude and inaction.

Long story short, this is what the 2025 Top 10 picture will likely look like.

The Cowboys are in a precarious situation here. Even with five players on rookie contracts the AAV of the Top 10 climbs to 62% of the cap, and five players on rookie contracts is a big ask and by no way a given:

• Sam Williams and/or Marshawn Kneeland will have to replace Tank Lawrence
• Mazi Smith needs to play up to his draft pedigree
• Tyler Guyton needs to be the franchise left tackle
• The team will have to draft immediate starters at WR and RB next year.

That puts a lot of stress especially on the 2023 rookie class whose eight picks did not deliver a single starter in their rookie season, as the Cowboys are well aware. Here’s Will McClay on what they need from the 2023 class:

“Those guys have to make a jump for us to succeed, and they’ve been in the system for a year,” McClay said. “When you draft players, those players don’t always immediately step in and fill that role. But when you’re drafting a player, you’re drafting him for the four to five years of their contract, and you’re trying to get a return on investment. We need those guys to take a jump now based on the cap and the way things are.” [Emphasis added]

On the salary cap side, once the Cowboys get their big three under contract, they have a lot of flexibility in terms of cap space and can continue to push money forward, which they’ll need to do anyway just to offset the looming dead money.

If the Cowboys want to continue paying their top players at top prices, every draft has to deliver immediate contributors and provide immediate cap savings. It also means they can’t keep high-priced veterans around forever. The Cowboys have to make some hard choices on the offensive and defensive line next year and will likely remain conservative at other positions on top of that.

They say you can’t have All-Pro players at every position in the NFL. The data here suggests you won’t even be able to pay just 10 (potential) Pro Bowlers at market rates.

Which 10 positions make up your Top 10 is debatable of course, but you’ll always have to make some kind of trade-off: You think the team needs a top TE? You probably can’t have that and two top WRs unless you make significant concessions somewhere else. Want a top safety? Get yourself some cheap defensive tackles or forget about paying top rates for both DEs. Want two top cornerbacks? Better hope they can cover really, really well, because you may not have any money left to invest in pass rushers.

And if you don’t want to make any of those choices?

Draft well. And draft the Money 5 high in every draft.