Getty Cowboys QB Dak Prescott
When the Dallas Cowboys gathered to announce quarterback Dak Prescott’s record-setting $160 million contract earlier this month, head coach Mike McCarthy was conspicuously absent from the in-person festivities.
It turns out, McCarthy revealed Thursday, that he was vacationing with his family in Florida during Prescott’s March 10 press conference at The Star which featured team owner/general manager Jerry Jones and executive vice president Stephen Jones.
But news of the sides’ historic agreement quickly spread — and celebration just as quickly ensued.
“It’s a lot easier to do cartwheels on the sand. I’ll say that,” McCarthy told reporters, smiling, via the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I was obviously very excited. He is definitely a keystone of moving forward as a football team. I was very excited about that.”
The pact put to bed year-long negotiations between Prescott and Dallas, discussions that became so monotonously unrelenting those in the building purposely fixated their attention on anything else around them.
”The best example was one morning in the training room, there were two TVs on,” McCarthy said. “One TV was all about Dak Prescott and the other TV was four squares and a Zoom call with a cat. Everybody was watching the cat because they were tired of watching the other TV.”
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‘The Keystone’
We’ll take McCarthy’s word for it that he did literal cartwheels upon learning of Prescott’s landmark deal. Figuratively, anyway, the former Super Bowl-winning head man is jumping for joy over Dak’s return from ankle surgery to his rightful place as the leader of an NFL juggernaut.
In 2020, Prescott was on pace to shatter the league’s single-season passing record — and the Cowboys likely en route to an NFC East crown — prior to his devasting compound fracture and dislocation, which required two surgeries and months of rehabilitation. (McCarthy noted that Prescott finished a workout at the facility just before Thursday’s news conference.)
In 2021, year two of the McCarthy regime, the plan is to pick up where a nearly-recovered Prescott and Co. left off. And this time, for the first time, with the COVID-19 pandemic lessening, McCarthy can put his fingerprints all over the operation, of which his franchise signal-caller is the ringleader.
“Dak lives here. He’s here every day. We need interaction,” McCarthy said, per the Star-Telegram. “Everybody keeps saying, ‘Hey coach, what do you need?’ We need time with our players. And our players want time with the coaches. We have a great vibe going on. I love the way the locker room is put together.”
“Dak, he’s the keystone of this football team. That’s the way I view it. That’s the way we’re going to push forward with it, too. The quarterback touches the ball every play. But also, his presence and his natural leadership ability is something that will continue to grow. I think you’ll see that in the locker room.”
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