OXNARD, Calif. — Every July, the Dallas Cowboys’ future is filtered through a tapestry of numbers.
How many free agents were signed? What extensions were achieved? How many years remain on the head coach’s contract? How much money is left under the salary cap? And of course, the unyielding accounting of how many years it’s been since that last Super Bowl win (28 and counting).
Now we can add this: How long the staring match is going to last between the team and two of its three biggest stars — quarterback Dak Prescott, who is actively practicing in training camp, and wideout CeeDee Lamb, who was nowhere near Oxnard, California, during Thursday’s first camp practice.
There’s plenty of other things going on with Dallas, but we’d be kidding ourselves if we think it’s not all a jumble of secondary storylines orbiting a supergiant star. And you really only needed to see the opening news conference kicking off training camp to understand the prism that Dallas is being focused through. With the clock ticking down on the first official practice of the season, it took 20 minutes and 40 seconds of the team owner/executive vice president duo of Jerry and Stephen Jones talking mostly about contract extension issues before a reporter took pity on head coach Mike McCarthy and asked him a question about the team.
“All right, here we go,” McCarthy said with a smile and a chuckle. “Let’s talk about football.”
A joking response that left Jerry to turn into McCarthy’s direction and interject about the previous 21 minutes: “Coach, that’s football.”
So it goes for Dallas. The contracts are the football as much as anything else inside the franchise. And it will continue to be that way for at least the next few weeks — until something develops with Lamb’s holdout or the waiting game with Prescott. But in the beginning of that expanse, some things are coming into view. There’s a little bit of soft gamesmanship taking place between Prescott, whose…
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