FRISCO, Texas — Dallas Cowboys executive vice president and director of player personnel Stephen Jones was on-hand at The Star on Monday morning as the Cowboys, in collaboration with Shriner's Children's Hospital, announced the arrival of the 99th annual East-West Shrine Game to The Star on Feb. 1, 2024.
After the event, Jones shed light on the ongoing contract negotiations with various extension candidates that include Trevon Diggs, CeeDee Lamb, Terence Steele and Dak Prescott among others. For the Cowboys' side of things, timing is of the most importance, as well as letting the negotiations come naturally.
"Timing has to be right for those guys and right for us, but our goal would be hopefully to start to chip away at this because we've got guys that have to be addressed moving forward," Jones said. "There's no specific order, it's just about when opportunity arises and you got to be motivated to want to do it."
As time passes, the price on valuable position groups continue to rise, and that isn't something that Jones is oblivious to moving forward, but he understands that the timing has to be right for both sides.
"Guys want to wait, and I understand why because prices go up from one year to the next, but people don't seem to be in that type of hurry," he said. "If opportunity is there, we'd like to get one, two, three of these guys signed."
Jones says that the Cowboys have made contact with each player that they hope to extend recently with the hope that one or multiple deals can get done before they leave for training camp on July 24.
"We'd love to do more than one [before camp] if we could," he said. "We've touched bases with everybody, knowing we're open-minded to it."
Trevon Diggs is entering the last season of his rookie deal while CeeDee Lamb and Micah Parsons each have two seasons left on their respective rookie contracts with a potential third team-option year available for Parsons in 2025. Prescott has four years left on his second contract with a potential option-out after the 2023 season. Terence Steele is slated to be an unrestricted free agent after the 2023 season.
