Dallas Cowboys News & Rumors

Cowboys, Dak Prescott Agree To Extension

The Cowboys and quarterback Dak Prescott have finally pushed their negotiations past the finish line. As ESPN’s Adam Schefter was first to report, Dallas and Prescott have agreed to a stunning four-year, $240MM extension that will make Prescott the highest-paid player in NFL history.

Schefter notes that all but $9MM of Prescott’s deal is guaranteed, which speaks to the inordinate amount of leverage that the three-time Pro Bowler wielded in this process. His $231MM in guaranteed money is $1MM more than Deshaun Watson received in his highly controversial deal with the Browns several years ago. And, as Ian Rapoport of NFL.com observes, Prescott’s guarantees — which include a record $80MM signing bonus — are $60MM higher than the next highest sum of guaranteed money ever handed out on a four-year contract.

[RELATED: Jerry Jones Addresses QB’s Record-Breaking Contract]

Throughout the offseason, questions lingered about whether or not the Cowboys would be able to work out deals with Prescott, wideout CeeDee Lamb and edge rusher Micah Parsons while saving the cap flexibility to make other moves. An otherwise quiet offseason revolved around negotiations on the Prescott and Lamb fronts in particular. The latter wound up cashing in on a $34MM-per-year extension which (like the former) will keep him in Dallas through 2028. Lamb did not reach the top of the receiver market, but Prescott has taken his position to new financial heights.

A $60MM AAV has long been a possibility, especially given the nature of the quarterback mega-deals worked out over the past two years and the position Prescott found himself in. No-tag and no-trade clauses were included in his previous pact, and Dallas was set to deal with a $55MM cap charge in 2024 in the absence of an extension coming into play. That was also the case for the dead money charge (roughly $40MM) in 2025 which would have been on the team’s cap sheet had Prescott departed in free agency next spring.

Both the 31-year-old himself and owner Jerry Jones made a number of public remarks in the build-up to today’s news. Continuing this relationship well past 2024 was a mutual goal, although Prescott hinted at testing the market on more than one occasion. Jones indicated in the spring he preferred to let the QB and WR markets take further shape before serious negotiations with Prescott and Lamb’s camps took place. That approach has yielded agreements for both, albeit along a less-than-ideal timeline given the missed time from training camp in one case and the run up to an artificial Week 1 deadline in the other.

Jones stated he would be on board with Prescott negotiations continuing into the regular season, but a late push by all parties involved yielded progress. That left the door open to an eleventh-hour agreement, although with Saturday night coming and going it appeared one would no longer be possible. In the end, however, Prescott is now on the books for the foreseeable future as he tries once again to guide the Cowboys to deep playoff run.

Dallas has posted a 12-5 record in each of the past three years, failing to convert that into postseason success in every instance. Head coach Mike McCarthy is entering a lame-duck year in no small part due to the Cowboys’ underwhelming defeat to the Packers during the wild-card round last season. Jones has routinely praised the former Green Bay Super Bowl winner, hinting he could be retained past the coming campaign depending on how things go. Prescott – who led the league in touchdown passes during McCarthy’s first year as offensive play-caller – will be expected to duplicate his success from 2023 for several more seasons.

Parsons (whose resume includes two first-team All-Pro honors, one second-team nod and three Pro Bowl invites) no doubt would have been a higher organizational priority if not for Prescott and Lamb entering the offseason as pending free agents. With both of their pacts now taken care of, attention will turn to Parsons’ level of play in his fourth campaign. The 25-year-old will set himself up for a major payday with another productive campaign in 2024, but Dallas’ cap outlook has of course been considerably altered in recent weeks.

Today’s deal (and, more specifically, the massive guarantee commitment) confirms Prescott will remain a Cowboy for most, if not all, of his career. His legacy remains linked to the franchise’s ongoing Super Bowl drought, but the next several years will offer an opportunity to break through in the postseason. It will be interesting to see, meanwhile, how the quarterback market shakes out in the near future with the top of the pecking order changing once again.

Rory Parks contributed to this post.

Jerry Jones Addresses Dak Prescott’s Deal

The Cowboys were one of few teams to experience two big wins today: their win over the Browns in Cleveland and the signing of their star quarterback to the highest salary in NFL history. Both were a long time in the works, but Dak Prescott‘s new contract is perhaps the more gratifying of today’s victories because of the wait.

Prescott’s extension, which includes $231MM in guaranteed money, an $80MM signing bonus, and a $60MM annual average, was the result of several months of negotiations. In that time, Cowboys fans frustratingly watched quarterbacks with arguably lesser accomplishments, like Trevor Lawrence and Jordan Love, become the highest-paid players in the NFL. The frustration wasn’t that players they deemed lesser were getting big contracts, it was that with every big quarterback contract that got signed, the price tag for Prescott kept going up.

There’s an argument to be made that if Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had worked faster to secure extensions for stars like Prescott and wide receiver CeeDee Lamb, the team could’ve have vastly saved on relatively cheaper deals. Instead of working to set the market, the Cowboys ended up being forced to react to it, leading to them being the only team in the NFL with two of the 20 highest-paid players in the NFL (by annual average) with Prescott at No. 1 and Lamb tied at No. 20.

The unofficial deadline that the team set for getting the deal done was the season opener, and Dallas snuck this one in before watching Prescott potentially test free agency at the end of the year. When asked if he was relieved to have got it done in time, Jones told reporters“Relief? No, I’m happy that it’s done. This was the time when it was right there for us to do. We were all set to go. That’s so critical.”

Jones claimed that the issue with getting a deal done was never about Prescott being the answer for them at the quarterback position. The concentration was just finding a way to make everything work, and the stars didn’t align until just in time to get the deal done.

“I think we all felt a little energy to come on in and, so to speak, get to a point where we could say ‘yes,'” Jones continued, per Clarence Hill of All City DLLS. “I’ve really known all along what a great player Dak is…I’ve seen too many very important deals not work out just because of miscalculating the right time when everybody’s ready to go. It was apparent to me over the last few days that we were ready to go and could put this in place.”

There was one other sticking point that kept holding Jones up throughout the process: the sheer magnitude of the money involved. “I’m talking about making him the highest paid player in the history of the NFL…$231 million guaranteed, I know, these numbers are beyond anything I could have ever imagined.”

In the end, the team got it done, and now, Prescott has the highest annual salary any player in the NFL has ever had. We don’t know all the specifics of the deal just yet, but ESPN’s Todd Archer tells us that his 2025 cap impact will include $26.13MM in bonus proration, in addition to the new proration of the signing bonus and new base salary. Jones claims he was working to put the Cowboys in the best position to win a Super Bowl in the future, and in his words, “(Prescott) was (their) best chance of getting one.”

Offseason In Review: Dallas Cowboys

Perhaps the worst letdown in a string of Cowboys playoff misfortunes caused Jerry Jones to make Mike McCarthy a rare lame-duck HC and stall on a Dak Prescott extension. The longtime owner received steady criticism for letting the Prescott and CeeDee Lamb situations fester throughout the offseason, one that otherwise featured few veteran augmentations.

Rookies became needed to fill holes along Dallas’ offensive line, and constant questions about how the team plans to assemble a backfield came out. As usual, however, the Cowboys kept it interesting as they remain on the job of trying to end a near-30-year NFC championship game drought.

Extensions and restructures:

With Micah Parsons under contract through 2025 via the fifth-year option, the Cowboys’ three-headed contract quagmire became a Lamb-Prescott matter as this offseason progressed. In Cowboys fashion, negotiations with each generated numerous headlines. One holdout ensued. But the team did reach a resolution with one of the two standouts, moving first to pay Lamb after his first-team All-Pro season.

Shifting to the Cowboys’ go-to performer after the 2022 Amari Cooper trade, Lamb led the NFL in receptions last season and broke Michael Irvin‘s single-season records for catches and yards by tallying 135 grabs and 1,749 yards. Serious extension talks did not pick up until training camp. Lamb surfaced as an extension candidate in 2023, and it would have been cheaper to extend him then. Per COO Stephen Jones, Lamb was not interested in an extension in 2023. Whatever the case may be, the 25-year-old wideout enhanced his value by both dominating in 2023 and waiting for other receivers to move the market well past $30MM per year.

Exiting the 2023 offseason, only Tyreek Hill had secured a $30MM-per-year deal at wide receiver. Hill’s pact also deceived, as a phony final-year salary propped up the AAV. Lamb and Justin Jefferson sought legit structures, and by the time Dallas’ WR1 came to the table, three other wideouts — Jefferson, A.J. Brown, Amon-Ra St. Brown — had moved past $30MM per annum. Jefferson’s $35MM-per-year deal that included $110MM guaranteed and $88.7MM guaranteed at signing played the biggest role in Lamb negotiations, just as it has in Ja’Marr Chase‘s Bengals talks.

Stephen Jones initially said Lamb was seeking to become the NFL’s highest-paid non-QB, topping Jefferson, but quickly retracted it. Jerry Jones then said the team was not operating urgently with Lamb before backtracking, after Lamb took issue with the owner’s situational assessment. The Cowboys submitted a few offers to Lamb, initially coming in below $33MM per year and then moving between $33-$34MM on average before finally reaching $34MM per.

The Vikings’ landmark deal reset the WR guarantee market, and this booming market did not feature the kind of deals the Cowboys typically work out. Dallas has long preferred lengthier contracts — spanning at least five years — but receivers in recent offseasons had opted for three- and four-year extensions. Dallas both bent on term length, guarantees and eventually AAV.

After previously never giving a wideout more than $60MM guaranteed, the Cowboys rewarded Lamb — after a weeks-long holdout — with $100MM locked in and $67MM at signing. Those numbers placed the 2020 first-rounder comfortably in second at the position.

As many big-ticket extensions now feature, a rolling guarantee structure offers Lamb year-out protection. His 2026 base salary ($25MM) shifts from an injury guarantee to a full guarantee in March 2025. Another $7MM for 2027 will shift from an injury guarantee to locked-in cash in 2026. The Cowboys used four void years packed with option bonuses to spread out Lamb’s cap hits; the extension saved the team more than $10MM in 2024 cap space.

[RELATED: Prescott Agreed To Four-Year, $240MM Extension On Sunday]

The Lamb holdout merely stood as a high-end undercard to Prescott’s main event. Dallas took this process to the wire — ahead of a soft Week 1 deadline — and is heading into rocky terrain with their ninth-year starter. After a rumor circulated indicating the Cowboys would be OK letting Prescott hit free agency next year, the team pushed back on it by insisting it wants to extend the former fourth-round find. Both team and player initially said a contract did not have to be done by Week 1, but Prescott later added that “it says a lot if it is or it isn’t.” This situation ran late into Saturday night, but Dak remains on the four-year, $160MM contract he signed in March 2021. As it stands, he is months from being one of the most coveted targets in free agency history.

The Cowboys are battling uphill against their quarterback, having given him extraordinary leverage thanks to a three-offseason negotiation that afforded the QB no-trade and no-franchise tag clauses. Dallas later completed multiple restructures, ballooning Prescott’s 2024 cap hit to $55.13MM and creating a $40.13MM dead money hit — thanks to void years — if he is not extended by the start of the 2025 league year.

Unless the 30-year-old passer receives a monster offer — the $60MM-per-year number has come up often — there is no reason for him to pass on approaching free agency. He did not shut down that path this summer.

Maligned due to his place as the centerpiece player on a team known for late-season shortcomings, Prescott is nevertheless coming off a second-team All-Pro season. The MVP runner-up bounced back from a down 2022 season, and if Kirk Cousins fetched $100MM in practical guarantees ahead of an age-36 season following Achilles surgery, Prescott would be in position to reset a quarterback market that has incrementally climbed to the $55MM-per-year place. As should be expected, Dak is targeting a deal north of that $55MM-AAV number.

Unless the Cowboys are keen on starting over at QB with a veteran team — this worked out well for the post-Super Bowl 50 Broncos — after Jerry Jones’ 82nd birthday, they will need to again give in. A contract flooded with guarantees and early vesting dates will almost definitely be required to keep Dak from testing the market, as a $60MM-plus-AAV accord would certainly await in 2025 if he plays out his contract year.

Jones has received steady criticism for letting his top players’ values increase by waiting on extensions, but this is a unique contract to complete. The sides are believed to be in agreement on term length, at least, and the Cowboys do have exclusive negotiating rights until mid-March. Though, the closer we get to free agency, the more challenging the mission becomes for the team.

The Cowboys’ longest-tenured player now that Tyron Smith is gone, Martin still earned All-Pro acclaim despite admitting he was not at his best following a holdout last year. Martin is a future first-ballot Hall of Famer who secured guarantees over his six-year contract’s final two seasons, but this restructure will inflate the dead money total the Cowboys would absorb if the soon-to-be 34-year-old blocker is not re-signed in 2025. The 11th-year veteran is considering retirement after this season. If Martin retires, the Cowboys would be tasked with replacing an all-time guard great and face a $26.5MM dead cap hit next year.

Free agency additions:

Elliott now counts more than $8MM on Dallas’ payroll; the other $6MM comes from dead money associated with the Cowboys ditching his previous contract. Once given a six-year, $90MM deal to anchor Dallas’ offense, Elliott is now 29 and enters the season with by far the most touches (2,421) among active backs. The Cowboys did miss two-time rushing champion’s nose for the end zone last season, but his presence atop the depth chart creates concern.

Even as Elliott closed the Bill Belichick era as the Patriots’ starting running back, his New England one-off produced a bottom-10 rushing yards over expected mark (minus-71). The Cowboys pursued Zack Moss in free agency but saw him join the Bengals on a two-year, $8MM deal. Dallas did not chase Derrick Henry this offseason, and rumblings about an Elliott reunion — a topic that came up last year even after Dallas made him a post-June 1 cut — emerged before March’s end.

It remains odd the Cowboys did not at least add a late-round RB flier of sorts, instead re-signing Rico Dowdle and bringing in Cook, who enters the season with the fifth-most touches (1,585) among active RBs. Following four straight 1,100-yard rushing seasons in Minnesota, Cook saw his play nosedive in New York. The would-be Jets bridge back to Breece Hall ended up being released. The Cowboys can elevate Cook to their active roster, but an Elliott-Dowdle-Cook committee — in 2024, at least — may well be the NFL’s least formidable backfield.

The reunion theme continued on defense. While Kendricks and Joseph have no previous Cowboys ties, they both played several seasons under new DC Mike Zimmer. Each served as part of the Vikings’ defense-powered core in the 2010s, helping the team to three playoff berths during Zimmer’s tenure.

Joseph, 35, will be charged with helping out a Dallas run defense that ranked 16th last season — but one that allowed Aaron Jones to run wild in the seminal wild-card loss. The recent Chargers and Bills D-tackle, Joseph has made 170 career starts. He will most likely work as a situational player tasked with aiding Dallas ground deterrence.

Kendricks, 32, comes over after becoming a cap casualty (by the Vikings and Chargers) in each of the past two seasons. The former Zimmer mainstay had a deal in place to be the 49ers’ bridge to Dre Greenlaw, but Kendricks backtracked on that commitment and joined a Cowboys team promising more opportunities. With the Cowboys moving undersized LB Markquese Bell back to safety, cutting Leighton Vander Esch and seeing 2023 third-round pick DeMarvion Overshown coming back from an ACL tear, Kendricks is suddenly needed again.

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Dak Prescott Cowboys Extension Still Possible Before Week 1

On the eve of their season opener, it remains to be seen if the Cowboys will reach agreement on a Dak Prescott extension. Team and player are negotiating a deal to continue their relationship beyond the 2024 campaign.

Recent updates on the situation have noted progress at the bargaining table, with an agreement reportedly being reached with respect to the length of a new contract. Value and guarantee structure will be key points of contention as in any high-profile negotiation, and Sunday represents an artificial deadline for an extension to be in place. In the latest development on this story, Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk reports there is a “small chance” the Cowboys and Prescott will get a deal over the finish line in time.

While a final agreement is not in place, DLLS’s Clarence Hill Jr. confirms the sides are still negotiating at this point with a very small window of time remaining. Owner Jerry Jones said last week a deal does not need to be signed by the start of the regular season, although teams generally prefer to get contract work done in time for Week 1. Prescott is currently slated to carry a cap hit of over $55MM in 2024, a figure which could be lowered on a long-term pact. The 31-year-old will leave Dallas with a dead money charge of more than $40MM if he departs as a free agent next spring.

Both Prescott and Jones have made clear their desire to avoid that, although the three-time Pro Bowler has also noted the multitude of longtime starting quarterbacks who have played for multiple teams during their careers. Prescott appeared to be open to negotiations continuing into the season, but he has since clarified he is not the one primarily responsible for whether or not that happens. Given the efforts made to reach an eleventh-hour agreement, it is clear all parties involved are interested in achieving clarity in advance of the season starting.

CeeDee Lamb inked a four-year extension averaging $34MM per season this summer, and edge rusher Micah Parsons will be in line for a deal putting him at or near the top of his position’s market during the 2025 offseason. Prescott could very well move to the top of the quarterback pecking order on his next deal, either on another Dallas extension or a contract sending him to a new team in March. The latter scenario being eliminated is still possible with mere hours remaining until the Cowboys’ season starts.

Cowboys Activate WR CeeDee Lamb

The Cowboys recently extended wide receiver CeeDee Lamb to a four-year, $136MM deal that gave him the second-highest annual average at the position in the NFL behind only Minnesota’s Justin Jefferson. It wasn’t smooth sailing to get there, though, as the negotiating process saw Lamb miss nearly all of the preseason as he held out to influence his new contract.

As a result of Lamb’s holdout, the Cowboys placed him on the commissioner’s exempt list upon signing his extension. This exempt list is usually reserved for players in unique situations, allowing a team to retain that player without needed to utilize a roster spot on them.

For Lamb, his placement was the result of his holdout. Dallas was granted a two-game roster exemption with his placement on the list, meaning the Cowboys could keep him there through Week 3, if necessary, without him counting towards their 53-man roster. This would allow Lamb to get back up to speed after not participating with the team throughout training camp and the preseason. Instead, the Cowboys will waste no time, activating him from the exempt list in time for Week 1.

In addition to this roster addition, Dallas has also opted to promote linebacker Nick Vigil as a standard gameday practice squad elevation. A former full-time starter for the Bengals, Vigil’s role in the NFL has diminished over the years. If he sees game action tomorrow, it will be a regular season appearance with the fifth team of his career.

Cowboys, Dak Prescott Making Progress In Extension Talks

SEPTEMBER 6: Stephen Jones confirmed on Friday (via team reporter Nick Harris) talks continue on the Prescott front. The team remains hopeful an agreement can be reached prior to Sunday, and attention will no doubt be focused on any movement in negotiations in the immediate future.

SEPTEMBER 5: CeeDee Lamb‘s extension is in place, and Micah Parsons may well need to wait until next offseason to finalize one of his own. The Cowboys still have the matter of a Dak Prescott deal to attend to in the days leading up to their season opener, however.

Negotiations on an extension have taken place throughout the summer, and efforts to reach an agreement continue before Week 1. During a recent Scoop City episode, Dianna Russini of The Athletic reported contract length is an issue between the parties (audio link). The financial element of a new Prescott accord is still expected to top the quarterback market, but Dallas could be hesitant about making another long-term commitment (at least, in terms of guaranteed money) in the 31-year-old. One year remains on the four-year, $160MM pact he signed in 2021.

However, DLLS’s Clarence Hill Jr. writes team and player are in fact in agreement on contract length at this point. He adds that progress has been made recently and as a result a deal is “closer than it has been” at previous times in the offseason. Owner Jerry Jones said last week an extension does not need to be in place in time for Week 1, but Hill describes Sunday as Prescott’s “arbitrary line of demarcation,” suggesting talks could be paused after that time if no deal is reached. ESPN’s Dan Graziano adds it would not come as a surprise for this situation to be resolved in the coming days, even if it resulted in Prescott falling short of the $60MM AAV mark he has been connected to.

Prescott has joined Jones in making numerous public comments on this situation, one which will see him carry a cap hit of over $55MM in 2024 as things stand (along with a charge of more than $40MM next year if he were to depart). Last year’s MVP runner-up has repeatedly hinted at a willingness to keep his options open, citing the volume of high-profile quarterbacks who have played for multiple teams in their careers. He and Jones have, on the other hand, made clear their preference to continue their long-running relationship in 2025 and beyond.

Lamb’s deal carries an AAV of $34MM, the second-highest figure for receivers. Whenever Parsons’ deal is in place, it will no doubt make him at least one of the league’s highest-paid edge rushers. Those commitments will make a new Prescott investment difficult to manage from a cap standpoint, but no clear successor is in place under center if he is allowed to leave on the open market next spring. Playoff success has been elusive in the Prescott era, something Jones remains acutely aware of in advance of head coach Mike McCarthy‘s lame-duck season.

“I don’t know that there’s any more urgency but I have tried to look at places that we are complacent or ways not to be complacent,” Jones said (via a separate Hill piece). “I’m looking for ways to make sure they can’t say that I’ve got some kind of structure that breeds complacency. It can be contracts. It can be conversations. It can be player decisions… I didn’t make many changes. But within the realm of not making changes, totally changing people out, I tried to turn up the heat on myself and everybody involved. And I think that’s what’s being discussed.”

A short window of time still remains for Prescott and the Cowboys to finalize an agreement. It will be interesting to see if talks continue into the regular season if needed, but if the parties are settled on many elements of an extension the immediate future could breed further traction and an end to the uncertainty surrounding Dallas’ quarterback direction.

2024 Offseason In Review Series

Minor NFL Transactions: 9/3/24

Here are Tuesday’s minor moves:

Buffalo Bills 

Carolina Panthers

Dallas Cowboys

  • Removed from IR via injury settlement: DE Viliami Fehoko

Houston Texans

Kansas City Chiefs

Seattle Seahawks

  • Removed from IR via injury settlement: DL Buddha Jones

Tennessee Titans

  • Waived: LB Luke Gifford
  • Removed from IR via injury settlement: WR Tre’Shaun Harrison

The Eagles waived Tuipulotu to make room for waiver claim Byron Young. Tuipulotu had worked as an Eagles rotational DT, playing 232 snaps in 2022 and 162 last season. A 2021 sixth-round pick, Tuipulotu notched two sacks and three tackles for loss last season.

Early September is a bit earlier than most teams poach a player of another club’s P-squad. The Panthers doing so means they must carry Swinson, a rookie UDFA out of Arizona State, on their 53-man roster for at least three weeks. Panthers tight ends Tommy Tremble and Ian Thomas are battling injuries. Swinson joins those two, veteran Jordan Matthews and rookie fourth-rounder Ja’Tavian Sanders on a rare five-TE depth chart.

Minor NFL Transactions: 9/2/24

Here are Labor Day’s minor moves:

Arizona Cardinals

Buffalo Bills

  • Removed from IR via injury settlement: CB Dee Delaney

Carolina Panthers

Dallas Cowboys

  • Removed from IR via injury settlement: WR David Durden

Las Vegas Raiders

Miami Dolphins

Minnesota Vikings

  • Removed from IR via injury settlement: TE Trey Knox

New Orleans Saints

  • Removed from IR via injury settlement: TE Kevin Rader

San Francisco 49ers

Washington Commanders

Stromberg sustained a knee injury that will require surgery. The 2023 third-round pick, one of five 2023 draftees that did not make Washington’s 53-man roster last week, will only need an arthroscopic procedure, per ESPN.com’s Jeremy Fowler. Stromberg is aiming to catch on somewhere else around the midseason point. He only played 26 rookie-year snaps on offense. The Arkansas product would technically have a chance to land back with the Commanders, depending on the terms of the settlement, but the team moving on so early may well point to the Adam Peters regime deeming the Ron Rivera– and Martin Mayhew-overseen move a mistake.

Davis figures to land elsewhere and play this season. The 28-year-old linebacker sustained a foot sprain and will be out for a few weeks, according to NFL.com’s Tom Pelissero. Davis played in 16 games, split evenly between the Saints and Panthers, last season.

Cowboys WR CeeDee Lamb Was Unwilling To Sign Extension In 2023; Details On New Deal

Cowboys brass has been criticized for waiting too long to pull the trigger on extensions for some of their star players, which has caused them to pay top-of-the-market prices when those extensions finally come to fruition. Owner Jerry Jones and executive vice president Stephen Jones faced the same criticism in the aftermath of the recent mega-deal they authorized for wide receiver CeeDee Lamb.

If the Cowboys had extended Lamb last year, they may not have had to go to the same lengths ($34MM per year, $67MM in practical guarantees) to secure his services for the foreseeable future. Of course, it takes two to tango, and Stephen Jones recently told Albert Breer of SI.com that Lamb simply was not going to sign a new contract in 2023, when he was first eligible for one.

Indeed, it was reported last July that Dallas was hoping to hammer out an extension for Lamb prior to the start of the 2023 season. At the time, Tyreek Hill‘s contract with the Dolphins was the only WR pact that featured an average annual value of at least $30MM, though that deal was famously bloated by a non-guaranteed salary in its final year that pushed the AAV to the $30MM mark. Even if Lamb was able to secure a more “genuine” $30MM/year accord back then, he chose to bet on himself while allowing the rising tide of the receiver market to continue lifting his boat.

Not only did Lamb turn in the finest season of his young career in 2023 — he posted a 135/1,749/12 slash en route to First Team All-Pro honors — he watched as fellow wideouts Amon-Ra St. Brown, A.J. Brown, and Justin Jefferson further expanded the upper reaches of the contractual landscape for wide receivers (a few weeks before Lamb put pen to paper, Hill also agreed to a restructure that landed him the most guaranteed money added to a contract without new years also being added).

Lamb is now second only to Jefferson in terms of AAV and guaranteed money. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk lays out the full details of the Lamb contract, noting that it is a clean, simple deal that does not include any of the “funny money” that artificially inflated the value of Hill’s original contract.

As was previously reported, Lamb will net a $38MM signing bonus, and his $1.15MM base salary for 2024 and $26.85MM base salary for 2025 are both fully-guaranteed at signing, as are his $1MM in per-game roster bonuses for 2025 (though those bonuses must be earned). Lamb’s $25MM base salary for 2026 is presently guaranteed for injury but will become fully-guaranteed in March 2025, and $7MM of his $28MM base salary for 2027 is currently guaranteed for injury; that figure will become fully-guaranteed in March 2026.

Aaron Wilson of KPRC2 details Lamb’s salary cap hits in each year of his contract. He will count just $8.75MM against the cap in 2024, but that number will jump to $35.35MM in 2025.