The Dallas Cowboys have tried – and failed – to sign Dak Prescott to a long-term contract, and it remains to be seen how Prescott’s gruesome ankle injury will impact negotiations going forward. 

“I look at it three ways,” Dallas Morning News Cowboys writer Calvin Watkins said on After Hours with Amy Lawrence. “They could franchise him again and pay him $37.7 million, which is a nice salary. They could work out a long-term deal with him, which is something they tried to do the last year or so and have failed to do so. Or they could do it this way and say, ‘Dak, we’ll give you $30 million this year with incentives: one-year deal, take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, go on the marketplace coming off severe ankle surgery.’ So those are the scenarios.”

Watkins believes that Prescott will play for the Cowboys in 2021, but he also believes Prescott’s long-term future with the team is in doubt.

“It’s not 100 percent that Dak will be with this team long-term,” Watkins said. “Just because of what happened this summer, and now with this injury, with all the uncertainty going into this upcoming offseason – you never know what might happen. I do believe he’ll be with the Cowboys in 2021. After that, I’m not so sure.”

Jerry and Stephen Jones are saying all the right things in the wake of Prescott’s injury, but they also said all of the right things in the last year and beyond – and no deal got done.

If both sides are committed to a future in Dallas, it shouldn’t be that difficult to iron out a deal, no?

“It really shouldn’t, but it is,” Watkins said. “I think the Cowboys and Dak are saying all the right things. Jerry Jones wants him back. Stephen Jones wants him back. Dak wants to come back. But they haven’t reached a deal as yet. I think the Cowboys undervalued the quarterback market a little bit. They did not offer Dak the money he obviously was looking for, and now the market has been kind of reset with what Pat Mahomes and Deshaun Watson got. You better hurry up and get this done because there’s a guy in Baltimore [Lamar Jackson] that’s going to be due probably in about a year or so, probably two years, and you don’t know what he might get. So the market is kind of messed up for the Cowboys now because they’re going to have to give Dak more money than they originally wanted to.”