Cowboys’ Dak Prescott ‘not trying to be highest-paid necessarily’; addresses possibility of leaving Dallas

DALLAS, Texas —  The Dallas Cowboys 2024 offseason has felt different than offseasons past for a variety of reasons.

For the first time in the their string of three consecutive 12-win seasons, Dallas was humiliated in the postseason with a 48-32 faceplant of a defeat against the seventh-seeded Green Bay Packers. The previous two years ended with one possession losses against the San Francisco 49ers. 

Another cause for a different feel around the Cowboys this time of year was of course the shift from owner and general manager Jerry Jones saying Dallas would be  “all in” to then saying they are going to “get it done with less” after letting many starters walk in free agency and mostly re-signing their own depth players. Veteran 32-year-old linebacker Erick Kendricks signing a one-year deal is the crown jewel of the Cowboys’ 2024 offseason. 

Much of the blame for the Cowboys spending an NFL-low $13.7 million in free agency and just under $20 million less than the next cheapest team — the New Orleans Saints ($32.2 million) — per OverTheCap.com, is their inability to get 2023 Second-Team All-Pro quarterback Dak Prescott and 2023 First-Team All-Pro wide receiver CeeDee Lamb re-signed to new deals to spread out their cap hits. The inability to do so and the subsequent inactivity surprises even Cowboys Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman. 

“That would probably be fair,” Aikman said Friday at the Children’s Cancer Fund’s “A Knight to Remember” gala when asked if he was surprised about the Cowboys’ offseason inactivity. “I thought they would have taken care of Dak already. You guys follow it closer than I do. I don’t know what the game plan is. I know that everyone concluded a lot about Jerry’s comments in Mobile about being all in  and what that might look like, so I think it’s caught a lot of people by surprise. … I do think there’s a lot of scrutiny every offseason with every team as to what they’re doing or what they didn’t do or what they did that everyone thinks was so good. Sometimes all that plays out well in the fall, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s what this team is going to be judged on. … It’s going to be judged on what they do in the regular season and more importantly what they do in the postseason next year.”

Aikman acknowledged that he felt the 2023 Cowboys, who won the NFC East and were the conference’s No. 2 seed, were capable of achieving much more than…