One line of thought is that Pat Mahomes’ deal makes getting one done with Dak Prescott easier

The NFL world changed on Monday when the Kansas City Chiefs and star quarterback Patrick Mahomes agreed to a 10-year contract extension. Being the best in the world at an extremely important position can command a lot of money.

If you are trying to find a quarterback in the game currently that compares to Mahomes, you can save your time. He is in a stratosphere all by himself and seemingly will be for the foreseeable future. It is very likely that he and the Chiefs win multiple titles over the life of his new deal.

Of course, the Dallas Cowboys are looking to pay a quarterback themselves in Dak Prescott, and every deal that happens with a signal-caller is of interest because that’s how business works. The market is impacted and influenced by what happens around it, and Mahomes’ deal is now a variable that the Cowboys (and Dak’s representation) have to consider. What could it mean?

Maybe the Mahomes deal means that it’s easier for Dak and the Cowboys to get one done

While the amount of money that Pat Mahomes got is certainly going to be something that Dak Prescott’s representation uses to their benefit, the length of the deal that the Chiefs star signed is going to be a variable that the Cowboys use. For so long the disagreement between Dallas and Team Dak has seemingly been an issue of time, well if the new precedent is a 10-year extension then that works in favor of the Cowboys.

The Cowboys have until next Wednesday (July 15th) to negotiate a long-term deal with Dak Prescott or else they will all have to play out the 2020 season with him on the franchise tag that he already signed. There is obviously a lot of unknown and uncertainty about football and the variables that surround it this season given the way that the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted all of our lives, but it is possible that the Mahomes deal helps a Dak one happen in time to avoid playing out the tag. From ESPN’s Bill Barnwell:

Prescott’s deal will be a little trickier, since he has already played through his rookie deal and is on a franchise tag. As I mentioned earlier this offseason, he could go year to year and end up making nearly $188 million over the next five seasons. Everything reported about this situation suggests the Cowboys and Prescott are disagreeing less about the money involved than they are about the years of the contract, with the quarterback preferring a shorter deal and the Cowboys wanting a longer one.

I don’t think the Cowboys would offer Prescott an 11-year extension to his franchise tag, but the Mahomes deal gives Dallas more fuel for its side of the argument. Prescott was always going to get more money than Mahomes over the next few years. While he will make $141.5 million over the first five years of his new deal, a Prescott contract is likely to come in somewhere between $170 million and $190 million over that same time frame. If anything, the Mahomes deal getting done makes it a little more likely Prescott and the Cowboys come to terms before the July 15 deadline.

To be clear Barnwell was noting that Prescott’s deal may be “a little trickier” than Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson’s as Prescott and Watson are now the two quarterbacks to watch for big deals with Mahomes locked up (you never know about Mitchell Trubisky, though!). Watson is on the same rookie contract timeframe that Mahomes previously was so Houston still holds two more years of team control which is what makes that situation less complicated.

Perhaps Pat Mahomes will be an outlier of sorts in that his deal takes place over the course of a decade while Dak Prescott’s might be more like the ones that we’ve seen in recent memory. It is definitely possible that Mahomes taking a 10-year deal could be what makes Prescott’s representation bend on a five-year deal given the enormous precedent set. Maybe they will win in annual average value where the Cowboys would win in time.

Speaking of time, the Cowboys are running out.