It’s hard to say that a guy who signed an eight-year contract reportedly worth $98 million made a mistake. But in the NFL, where the player is far more bound to the deal than the team, left tackle Tyron Smith apparently has given the Cowboys near-unilateral control over the balance of his career.
“There’s no way you can do a deal that long,” a league source with extensive experience negotiating player contracts told PFT. “I’m stunned. . . . 10 years is nuts.”
The extension reportedly places Smith under contract for a total of 10 years at a payout of $110 million. He’ll have no power to get more money, no matter how well he performs. And if he doesn’t perform well, the only security he’ll have is the fully-guaranteed money that he received when committing himself to the Cowboys for the next decade.
The full details eventually will be known, and we’ll get a chance to see just how team friendly the contract is. Unless every year of the contract is fully guaranteed (and if it were, that detail would have been leaked), the mere duration of the deal makes it a bad one for the player -- who apparently wanted to do a contract badly enough that he was willing to make a commitment that, for nearly all NFL contracts, never is mutual.
Apparently, the Cowboys knew how badly Smith wanted that new contract, and the Cowboys took full advantage of it.