Jerry Jones says he did not know about contract incentive involving QB Cooper Rush

The Dallas Cowboys played the final game of their season on Sunday and it was a forgettable one to say the least (although the fourth quarter was a bit frenetic).

Perhaps Sunday’s season finale will sit firmly in your mind. Maybe you will never forget it. Odds are that Trey Lance and his family will recall it in some way as it was his first (and likely only) start at quarterback for the Cowboys in his two-year tenure with the team.

Word first broke that Dallas was going to have Lance see “significant” snaps at quarterback on Saturday and did so amid a bit of controversy. This was the case as it was reported earlier in the week that quarterback Cooper Rush had an incentive in his contract worth $500,000 that was dependent on play time percentage that he would surely not reach if he did not play on Sunday (he wound up not playing at all).

Cowboys QB Cooper Rush gets $500,000 in incentives if he plays 55% of the team’s snaps this season.

Going into Sunday he’s played 52.5%. Depending on snaps, he’ll need to play most or all of the game to reach that incentive, otherwise he’ll only earn $250k for reaching 45% mark

— Jonathan Jones (@jjones9) January 2, 2025

The Cowboys have had a horrible season which means that people have jumped at anything and everything they could across it all. The front office has been at the middle of many low points and would-be controversies, and was so in the aftermath of all of this news.

Let us say now that it is possible that the Cowboys find a way to take care of Rush. They very well even bring him back and add the money “lost” to a new deal and square everything in that sense.

Jerry Jones was asked about this whole saga in the aftermath of Sunday’s game and defended the team’s, or at least his own, position by saying that he did not even know about the incentive until he read about it, seemingly when the world did.

Jerry Jones is the operating general manager of the Dallas Cowboys. You can believe what you would like to as far as what that exactly means, but it doesn’t change that it is true in a titular sense.

As you can imagine this generated another wave of discussion about Jerry and the Cowboys. Bob Sturm put it well in that Jerry cannot claim to be the general manager of the team and not know about something like this given that it is a GM’s job to do so.

“I didn’t even know about it until I read about it.”

Ok, buddy. Here is the reality: either you are the GM or you aren’t. If you don’t know what your own team contracts say, then you are the worst GM in the league. Every GM’s job is to know that. https://t.co/KWA1DHhll0

— Bob Sturm (@SportsSturm) January 5, 2025

As mentioned previously, these are the kinds of things that really blow up when you have a horrible season and nothing is available to cover you up. That is certainly the case for the Dallas Cowboys right now.