Dallas Cowboys contract mistakes with Parsons, Prescott, Lamb

In an era in which "player empowerment" is a buzzy phrase and NFL teams pour the GDP of small nations into finding and retaining superstar players, one franchise has chosen to proudly install itself as the test case for what a team could do if it didn't care about making its best players happy. While most franchises coddle their young stars publicly and privately, sign them to contracts as quickly as allowed and position them as core pieces for their Super Bowl runs, the Dallas Cowboys have posited an entirely different argument: What if we just make them mad with no real benefit in return?

And so, in a league in which lesser quarterbacks have been happily paid tens of millions of dollars and have been given glowing reports by the coaches and general managers whose job security is tied