It doesn’t truly feel like the offseason until we have some drama surrounding the Dallas Cowboys and a contract situation. The proverbial ice broke this week at the NFL combine. If I’d told you a few weeks ago that this would be the case you would have likely assumed that the player at hand would have been wide receiver George Pickens.
You would have been wrong. Brandon Aubrey is the center of this particular saga.
Here are reported details of the back and forth between Dallas and Aubrey
This week has brought forth some consternation, but within that there have also been
several details. Reports from The Dallas Morning News and DLLS Sports have indicated that that the Cowboys had an offer out to make Aubrey the highest-paid kicker in the NFL. At the moment, Kansas City’s Harrison Butker leads the way with an APY of $6.4M so “highest-paid” could have been anything north of that.
It was reported that Aubrey’s camp asked for $10M annually which is obviously a sizable leap. For what it’s worth, Aubrey refuted those claims on social media which officially meant that we had a back and forth going on. The story became a matter of which side you believed more.
Early Thursday morning we got a little bit of clarity on the matter by way of Clarence Hill. He noted that the Cowboys made the “highest-paid” offer back in September and that Aubrey’s representation (Todd France, who also represents Dak Prescott and we all know how those negotiations went) countered at $10M to table talks until this week.
If you expand Clarence’s post you can see that France shut down conversations until getting on the Cowboys’ team bus while at the NFL combine. France posted about that on social media on Wednesday.
The TL;DR here seems to be that the Cowboys offered Brandon Aubrey a deal that made him the top paid kicker in the NFL (in some capacity, obviously we don’t know the details) and that France (this is my interpretation here, not the report) may have countered with a number that was obviously farfetched in the name of punting to a later point in question. We now seem to be at that point.
What could be the hold up if the Cowboys made an offer of the reported variety? Perhaps it is the guarantee involved. Maybe it is the length of the deal. Those details certainly matter and would provide context.
