It’s close enough to April 1 to wonder whether it was all a ruse. It apparently wasn’t. It should have been.
Bruce Drennan, characterized by SI.com as a “longtime Cleveland Sports broadcaster,” has cited a “pretty darn good source within the Browns organization” in support of the notion that the Browns “are negotiating as we speak with the Dallas Cowboys for a trade for Dak Prescott.”
It is ridiculous. It is laughable. It should never have been said with a straight face. And it never should have been amplified by SI.com, or by anyone. Other than to say it’s ridiculous and laughable.
It doesn’t require any reporting to show it’s not true. (Nevertheless, multiple reports have shut it down.) It requires only common sense to know that it is, to use a technical term, bullshit.
Here’s the key fact. The Cowboys have already activated their prerogative to turn the bulk of Prescott’s 2025 salary into a guarantee. Given the cap consequences of doing that — as opposed to simply trading away his base salary without conversion — there’s no way they would do it. Period. The end. Finito.
By converting most of Prescott’s salary into a bonus, the Cowboys have pushed $36.6 million in cap space into future years. If they trade him now, it all crashes back into the 2025 cap. Put simply, if the Cowboys were going to trade him, they shouldn’t have (and wouldn’t have) restructured the deal.
As it stands, Prescott as a cap number of $52.974 million for 2025. (He also has a no-trade clause.) If the Cowboys trade Prescott before June 1, another $97.356 million would hit the cap in 2025. That would push the total cap charge to $150.33 million.
So there’s the answer. It’s NOT happening. It can’t happen. If it were ever going to happen, it would have happened before the Cowboys converted $45.75 million of Prescott’s 2025 salary into a bonus, avoiding another $36.6 million in 2025 cap charges.
Even without the restructuring, it would have been a very remote possibility. With the restructuring, it’s an impossibility. And anyone who would suggest otherwise is exposing their complete lack of knowledge or understanding regarding the way NFL contracts work.
