The public, in general, is generally easy to persuade. When it comes to talking about a player’s income, it doesn’t even take a strong breeze to push the public in a pro-owner direction.

If the right people with the right amount of reach are given a specific piece of information to disseminate, it usually weaves its way through the public, despite how many people raise a hand to say that something doesn’t smell right. That seems to be the case with the latest report coming out about the Dallas Cowboys and their negotiation with QB Dak Prescott.

Jane Slater of the NFL Network broke the news Prescott was reportedly asking to be the highest-paid player in the NFL, and by a wide margin, $40 million a year.

I can confirm reports that QB Dak Prescott has, in fact, turned down 30M a year offer and is instead seeking 40M a year per source informed. #Cowboys — Jane Slater (@SlaterNFL) August 12, 2019

Slater is one of the best in the business and routinely … routinely offers a fair platform to both players and owners. She’s good at what she does and the information from her source absolutely needed to be brought to the public. But the report needs to be parsed. Slater confirmed multiple reports Prescott turned down $30 million a year.

There is a single source per her own words, not plural, saying Prescott is asking for $40 million a year. More on that in a second.

Rising player costs are the result of, not the cause of, teams charging fans exorbitant ticket and merchandise prices.

Repeat, the result of, not the cause. The owners have chosen to hike the costs of being a fan to increase their profits, because they know you the consumer will pay them. As a result of their additional profit, the players share — a predetermined percentage of revenue no matter how high or low — i.e. the salary cap, steadily goes up as a result of owners charging $12 for a beer and $8 for a box of fries.

The front office knows the public generally sides with ownership when it comes to new salaries.

Over hundreds of years, America has built up super-wealthy business owners as pillars of morality (with no regard for the often underhanded ways wealth is built), and as being deserving of hoarding the majority of the nation’s income.

Their indiscretions are routinely forgiven because it’s long been ingrained in society the rich operate under a separate set of rules.

How does that impact football? Fans see billionaire owners, who the fans shell out hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to annually, as being the rightful gatekeepers of their favorite entertainment option.

Actually fans rarely see them, except in the case of guys like Jerry Jones. Most owners stay in the shadows because if a fan doesn’t see ownership, then these negotiations can truly be seen as the one player against the rest of the team fans love.

Root for the laundry, not the name on the back, right?

It doesn’t matter the names on the back are far closer to a fan’s personal experience than ownership. When childhood dreams of being a professional athlete whither away at the end of a junior varsity bench, everyone then dreams of becoming management, and that’s that.

Doesn’t matter that the players mostly come from humble beginnings, and have had to work their way to the the top of their profession with the same blood, sweat and tears ordinary guys put into getting through their own lives.

Jealously of star-athlete treatment starts at a very young age, and admitted or not, those things stay ingrained in people as they grow up. At a young age, star athletes are seen as just more physically gifted, and there’s little attention paid to the rigors they put themselves through to grow from a high school star into a professional.

The truth is most of us have no chance of being the best at anything professionally, much less sports. The definition of the term demands that most fall short, no matter the amount of effort.

For some it is too much to root for unless those player’s efforts are 100% aligned with the wants of the owners, er um, the uniform.

The fan has no problem giving away their hard-earned cash to Jones and his family for simply finding the talent that entertains them, but they have a problem with Jones and his family having to pay the entertainers what they’d be worth on the open market.

That’s mucked up.

Here’s just one example, after presumably the Joneses (because why would Prescott’s side) leaked the idea Prescott wanted as much as $40 million a year, of that reaction.

But 40 million though? I’m not saying he shouldn’t be making money, I’m just saying he should be grateful for what he already is making. https://t.co/TvqQyJAcKu — Megan 🌺 (@01Megan18) August 12, 2019

That was the more tame of Twitter user @01Megan18’s replies on the subject.

In her since-deleted initial tweet, the user derided Dez Bryant for standing up for his former Cowboys teammate, using words to convey a sentiment athletes are just here to sing and dance and a disgust at how dare players demand to be paid this amount when teachers and doctors and “important” people get paid far less.

Nowhere in here rant did the user mention an issue with the Cowboys’ franchise being worth $5 billion after being purchased 30 years ago for under $150 million. There was no sense of understanding that every penny players earn, regardless of how it’s distributed among them, is part of a formula that pays the 2000-plus less than 50% of only a portion of what the owner’s bring in each year.

Not all revenue is included in the part the players get a piece of the profits from. Many don’t realize that, or don’t care.

All many choose to see is the laundry’s side, the greedy player is asking for so much they are going to hurt the owner’s chances of putting together a good enough team to win a championship.

Or at least, that’s the reason some hide their vitriol behind.

The big, bad salary cap they likely don’t fully understand exists because the owners self imposed it on themselves. If the owners wanted to, they could spend a virtually limitless amount of team revenue on player salaries. But the owners agreed with themselves to have a limitation, then use fluctuations in negotiations with the player’s union to get other things they feel are beneficial to their business model.

Again, negotiations happen here too. But the owners remain constant, the unions consistently turn over at almost a 100% clip every 10 years, so long term gains of leverage are often muted by the brief nature of playing careers.

Notice how there isn’t a salary cap for coaching staffs, as integral a piece of the championship puzzle as the players. Ever wonder why that is? But we digress.

No, many in the public don’t think those things out, because it’s much easier to blame the modern-day athlete for being greedy, despite putting their bodies on the line day in and day out, risking physical harm the majority of the public couldn’t endure, and the life-quality risks of things like brain damage from repeated head injury. The owners have done everything in their power to shield the likelihood of this from both said athletes and the paying public.

Of course, the dissemination of this anti-player stance, the greedy, ungrateful for their opportunity to get paid to play a game and the hands-tied owner, couldn’t be accomplished without having a vehicle to Uber the message to the public.

Enter the willing media.

The media has been witness to countless negotiations between team and player. They aren’t naive as to how it works, yet joke after joke went out on Monday night, carrying the water for Cowboys ownership about how ludicrous it was for Prescott to ask for that much money.

Wait, maybe Dak Prescott is asking for $40M so he can split it with Ezekiel Elliott. — Adam Rank (@adamrank) August 12, 2019

This fueled the reactionary public’s ire; giving legitimacy to the Cowboys claim, despite multiple reports refuting Prescott ever even asked for that much.

Source says report that Cowboys QB Dak Prescott wants $40M per year is all-caps false, under new-money standard or total value at signing analysis. — ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) August 12, 2019

Dak Prescott is not asking for $40 million per year from @Cowboys and even reporting he's turning down $30 million on average is somewhat misleading, as @PFT reports. Yes, details matter. As I said even earlier, what's the structure, the real guarantees, etc.? So, relax. — Chris Mortensen (@mortreport) August 12, 2019

The team offers one thing, lower than the amount they are truly willing to go up to. The player counters with an amount higher than what they will accept. The two sides use those starting points to negotiate the finer parts of the deal, the stuff that truly matters.

How much guaranteed money will be in the deal? How much will be in the first three seasons? What’s the total length of the commitment?

Once a deal is signed, a player cannot escape it — that’s why total length matters. The team, however, can escape the deal at any point, usually after the guaranteed portion runs out. Even before then, the team can trade said player to a city and team the player did not negotiate with, giving them no control of such things after a deal is signed.

There are so many ins and outs of a negotiation.

Say Prescott did ask for $40 million. The consensus is he’s not satisfied with what the Cowboys are telling the public they already offered, a deal that would make him a top-5 paid QB, which at this point is at least $32 million per season.

But what if that offer came with an insufficient amount of guaranteed money? Or required Prescott to sign a 10-year pact that would make his contract look foolish in just three seasons?

None of those details are included in these Stephen Jones sound bites, of course. Yet here we are as a general public, assigning blame to Prescott, by default making the Jones family out to be the aggrieved billionaires being held hostage by yet another greedy athlete.

The American public has been bred to never discuss their compensation with coworkers, a method of control by rich business owners in order to maintain leverage in individual negotiations. It’s ingrained in our society. No wonder people have so much to say when there’s a one-sided report about what one person is seeking in their negotiations.