No one should blame Dak Prescott for signing the deal with the Cowboys Finally placed before him, a historic contract that makes him the NFL’s first player to earn $60 million a year and allows him to retain his prestigious (if pressure-filled) role as Team America’s quarterback. For a 31-year-old passer who recently welcomed his first child and has already overcome a serious injury, that kind of job security must have been appealing.

But unless you’re part of Prescott’s immediate family or one of the biggest pro-Dak Cowboys fans, this deal, and especially the timing of it, is a bit of a disappointment. Prescott was just hours away from entering the most entertaining contract year the NFL has ever seen.

Imagine what the next few months might have been like. Every game, maybe even every quarter!, would have been a referendum on Prescott and Jerry Jones and the entire Cowboys franchise. Every touchdown pass would add millions to his next contract; every misstep would become a new chyron on First recordingIt would have been tiring and exciting at the same time.

But this isn’t really about Prescott or how much more than $240 million he could have squeezed out of quarterback-desperate owners by March of next year (though it probably would have been a lot). This is about the power structures of the NFL and how even when individual players like Prescott win and the positional salary markets go up year after year, the players will never have any real power.

It’s not a bug that elite players almost never reach free agency. It’s a feature that NFL owners have capitalized on and worked to preserve. They’ve built fifth-year team options for first-round picks into the collective bargaining agreement and routinely used the franchise tag to keep productive veterans out of free agency.

Lamar Jackson even went so far as to request a trade from the Ravens just days before the team awarded him the non-exclusive franchise tag for 2023. The tag (as opposed to the exclusive one) was supposed to give Jackson a chance to test his market and see what other teams could offer him. Still, still had all the power—they had the chance to match any offer, and guess what, even teams that clearly needed a new quarterback weren’t willing to push the market. I won’t use the c-word here (but I be able to (they’ve done that in the past), but it was certainly suspect! (Jackson did eventually get his new contract from the Ravens, briefly making him the highest-paid quarterback by annual salary, but in 2024 he’ll make less than Jared Goff, Jordan Love, and Tua Tagovailoa, among others.)

The Ravens would probably argue that this is just smart business! And they would be right. Even a young player with Jackson’s unique dynamic and MVP resume is no match for the NFL system.

Smart teams often try to get early extensions for their star players to beat the market as the salary cap continues to rise, and they structure those deals in ways that are team-friendly. That’s what the Eagles did with Jalen Hurts in April 2023. And it’s certainly what the Chiefs did with Patrick Mahomes in July 2020. Sure, things looked great for Mahomes at the time he signed that 10-year, $450 million contract extension. That’s nearly half a billion dollars! But four years and two more Super Bowl MVP awards later, his contract is a steal for the Chiefs. He’s under contract through 2031, and there are now 11 quarterbacks earning a higher average salary than Mahomes.

Dumber teams, such as, ahemThe Cowboys drag out contract negotiations far longer than they should and end up paying top-of-the-market deals. (See: Lamb, CeeDee.) Would anyone be surprised if Micah Parsons’ contract negotiations dragged on for months, as he and Jones sparred in the media, before Parsons became the highest-paid defenseman in the league next year? But even these teams that are bad at roster management typically re-sign their best players before those players can negotiate with other teams in free agency.

The power of NFL players will never truly match that of their professional basketball counterparts. In the NBA, when you reach a certain level of stardom, you are given a commensurate level of power—in the form of max contracts and massive guarantees and leverage to convince your bosses to sign the free agents you want. Or you are given freedom and the ability to leave for a more desirable destination, or more money, or both, with nothing standing in your way.

Prescott would have been the first quarterback in recent memory to come close to that level of influence in the NFL. He played out the rookie contract he signed as a fourth-round pick in 2016, was franchise-tagged by the Cowboys in 2020 but suffered a serious ankle injury later that season. He signed a massive new contract with no-tag, no-trade clauses in 2021, and he didn’t hold out at any point this offseason — as players typically do when trying to force an extension into a contract year. He seemed content to either push Jones all the way to this artificial Week 1 deadline to hammer out a new deal, or delay negotiations until next spring, when Jones would have to contend with at least a handful of wealthy and quarterback-needy co-owners.

It’s truly astonishing (or perhaps depressing) that the only quarterbacks to truly buck the system are Deshaun Watson and Kirk Cousins. Watson didn’t do it via free agency, but after somehow convincing several teams to outbid each other, but only after it was clear he wouldn’t be charged with multiple crimes and after the Texans made it clear they wanted to trade him. (It’s worth noting that other NFL owners weren’t happy when the Browns gave Watson a fully guaranteed $230 million deal — and it wasn’t because of Watson’s ugly off-field issues.)

Cousins, consistently good but never great, twice reached free agency as the best veteran quarterback available. In 2018, he parlayed that leverage into a fully guaranteed three-year deal with the Vikings; this offseason, he rejoined the Falcons on a deal that includes $100 million in guarantees, despite being 36 and recovering from a torn Achilles tendon.

If that boys, in that situations, got That big money, imagine what free agency for a top-10 quarterback could look like! At the risk of throwing cold water on the The Bell‘s 2025 free agent coverage, without Prescott, who finished second in MVP voting last season and currently sits at No. 6 The Bell‘s QB Rankings, on the board, look bleak. The list of impending free-agent passers is a who’s who of failed first-round picks—Sam Darnold, Zach Wilson, Justin Fields, Trey Lance and Marcus Mariota—mixed with a lackluster group of NFL pros like Jacoby Brissett and Taylor Heinicke.

It could be years before another quarterback is in a position to truly shake up the NFL free agency system. Maybe in five or six years, after he exercises his fifth-year option and spends a year on the franchise tag, Caleb Williams is the one to do it (Williams asked the Bears to insert a no-tag clause into his rookie deal; the Bears told him to chop sand). Until then, we’ll just have to dream of what might have been and let Dak Prescott count his new money.