Cowboys news: More debate about George Pickens’ future
Cowboys would have lost the plot if wild George Pickens take came to fruition – Levi Dombro, The Landry Hat
Beat writer throws out a wild hypothetical to signify a change in Dallas’ pecking order.
Albert Breer believes George Pickens could be Dallas Cowboys’ WR1 over CeeDee Lamb by 2028
Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer sifted through another mailbag on Tuesday. When he was asked if Pickens can overtake CeeDee Lamb as the Cowboys’ No. 1 wide receiver in 2027, Breer replied with the only one-word answer that makes sense.
“No.”
But Breer quickly qualified his answer in somewhat ridiculous fashion.
“But I could see that in 2028,” Breer said. “If Pickens becomes a top of the food chain receiver, like it looked like he was becoming last year. Since he was a teenager, he had the potential to get there, right? He’s been viewed by NFL people this way for a long, long time. The character stuff, the off-field, whatever you want to call it, has gotten in the way of all of that. If he becomes that this year, and he takes it up even another notch from where he was last year, then I think the Cowboys have a good dilemma on their hands.”
What is that good dilemma, exactly? Well, to Breer, it’s a difficult conversation to be had about choosing either Pickens or Lamb, and not employing both of them while letting the Cowboys’ talent bleed elsewhere or asking veterans to take a pay cut for a chance at a ring.
“If they wind up paying George Pickens over $40 million per year to be that guy for them, and that would take him walking the straight and narrow all year and proving it again from a character standpoint and showing that he’s grown up and all that different stuff, in addition to the production. But if they were going to pay him at that level, now I think you have a little bit of an issue with CeeDee Lamb. Because CeeDee Lamb has been your No. 1, and if you look at the recent history, a lot of players in this day and age now look at it and say, ‘The end of my contract isn’t the end of my contract. The end of my contract is the end of my guaranteed money.’ And the reality is that the deal that CeeDee Lamb did in 2024, most of the guaranteed money is done after this year. I believe he’s got $7 million guaranteed after this year in 2027. If you pay Pickens at the highest level, and now you have CeeDee Lamb coming back, and there’s not much guaranteed money left in his contract, does he make noise about that? Does that become a problem?”
ESPN thinks Cowboys breakout 2025 star makes for perfect summer trade – Todd Brock, Cowboys Wire
Speaking of Pickens, the worldwide leader in sports suggests now is the time to sell high on Pickens.
In writing up five NFL players who enjoyed significant breakouts in 2025, ESPN’s Ben Solak was all but compelled to include Cowboys wide receiver George Pickens. By any measure, the Cowboys’ experiment to pair him alongside CeeDee Lamb was indeed a massive success, as Pickens turned in career-best numbers and earned his first Pro Bowl nod and All-Pro honors (second-team).
“We’ve thought Pickens could be good for a while,” writes Solak, but few could legitimately have expected what the mercurial Steeler went on to do over his first year in Dallas. And while his mere attendance at Cowboys minicamp this week was met with both a collective sigh of relief from fans and universal praise from coaches and teammates, Solak points out that things could easily change. And Pickens is still uniquely primed to wind up in a new uniform sometime soon.
First, the catapult of Pickens’s game into another stratosphere. Despite being the bookend to a superstar in Lamb — who was coming off three straight seasons of 150 or more targets — Pickens nevertheless produced at a remarkable clip, much more so than his years in Pittsburgh had shown. 2025 saw Pickens targeted 29% more than his previous high-water mark, make 47% more catches, log 25% more yards, and haul in a whopping 80% more touchdowns.
Per Solak, Pickens ran more vertical routes in the Cowboys offense, upped his successful reception rate by more than 15 percentage points, and finished second in the league in receptions that either moved the sticks or scored. While he points out “it’s tempting to call Pickens’s 2025 a trend with a full chest’s worth of confidence,” there is at least a sliver of hesitation.
Jaydon Blue can spark a shocking Cowboys decision – Cody Warren, Inside the Star
Can the second-year runner spur the Cowboys in making surprsing move?
Jaydon Blue’s return ability could give the Dallas Cowboys a tough roster decision and turn KaVontae Turpin into a good trade chip. I’m not saying the Cowboys should cut Turpin. That would be a terrible roster decision, but a trade. That’s something that could add some ammo for the 2027 draft. Is Turpin a roster lock, or did the Cowboys draft a player last season that could turn him into a trade chip? I think if Jaydon Blue proves he can handle return duties, Dallas needs to have an honest conversation with themselves about a tough decision.
I don’t want that to be any disrespect to KaVontae Turpin. I like Turpin and the juice he brings every game. There are not many players on this roster who can flip a game with one touch, and Turpin is one of them. But we have to see it as it is; this is the NFL. Specialists get expensive. When a cheaper player starts overlapping with an older, more expensive player, smart teams at least take phone calls.
Jaydon Blue Changes the Math
Jaydon Blue isn’t just some second-year player Dallas hopes can catch kicks. He has the speed, 4.38 forty time, and that could pay off in a return game built on angles, acceleration, and one crease turning into six points. I think the bigger issue is that Blue is a running back first. If Blue becomes a bigger part of the offense, which I think he will, he is not taking up a roster spot just to return kicks. Brian Shottenheimer hasn’t talked about Blue taking Turpin’s job, but he has talked about Blue’s speed, acceleration, new-found professionalism, and comfort level. Why does this matter? If Jaydon Blue does check off all those boxes and is a part of the running game, adding him on special teams as a returner creates an overlap. And I think that is where hard roster decisions have to be made.
History Says Returners Can Fade Fast
This is the part I believe matters more than Jaydon Blue just taking over returns. Return specialists don’t always decline slowly. A player can lose one step, and suddenly that return game fear starts to fade. This doesn’t mean Turpin is washed. I just think Dallas should be thinking ahead before the decline shows up on Sundays.
Why Cowboys left too much meat on the bone in the red zone – One Cool Customer, Blogging the Boys
How Dallas’ prolific offense left some points on the board last season.
Red zone play, and particularly the red zone play-calling, has been a favorite whipping boy for the Cowboys’ offensive struggles for a couple of years now, so it may be worth refreshing our memories about how good or bad the Cowboys actually were in the red zone over the last few of years.
The traditional way of measuring red zone performance is Red Zone Touchdown Percentage (RZ TD%), which measures how often a team scores a TD on a drive that entered the red zone on at least one play. But you can see from the table above that it’s far from a perfect measure.Take 2025. The Cowboys RZ TD% of 57% last year ranked “only” 18th in the league. Yet compared to the No. 1 red zone offense in 2022, the Cowboys were short by only three TDs. And in terms of the number of red zone drives, 2025 matches the record-breaking 2021 scoring offense. So as a pure performance indicator, RZ TD % can be a bit misleading.
Perhaps a better way to think of RZ TD% is as a “meat-left-on-the bone” stat. League-wide, an elite red zone offense generally operates above a 65% touchdown conversion rate, so the 2025 offense left a lot of meat on the bone relative to some other teams in the league.
Consider that the 2025 Cowboys ranked seventh in total points scored and second in total yards. So they were definitely a prolific offense, but despite those gaudy numbers, many Cowboys fans felt uneasy as soon as the Cowboys made it into the red zone, fearful that this would just be another drive that would stall a few yards short of the end zone.
And that eye-test, though notoriously fickle and unreliable, is not wrong. The Cowboys did get bogged down way more in the red zone than their high-octane, between-the-20s offense would have led you to believe. So let’s walk through a handful of metrics to understand what was going on in the red zone.
Red zone drives vs total drives
The Cowboys had 177 total drives last year, which ranked a middling 17th in the league. This is not necessarily a number that the offense controls by itself. The ability of the defense to get the ball back quickly (non-existent in 2025) and the opponent both influence that number. Still, the Cowboys took 65 of those drives into the red zone, and that RZ drive conversion percentage of 36.7% ranks the Cowboys a comfortable fifth in the league, pretty much in line with where they rank as a scoring offense.
Red Zone Scoring Efficiency
RZ TD% only measures TDs and ignores field goals. And while scoring a TD is the optimal outcome of a RZ drive, each time a FG is kicked, it isn’t worth as much as a TD, but still counts for something. If you consider that total red zone drives multiplied by seven (and ignoring two-point conversions) is the maximum scoring potential, then you can measure your total scoring (TDs x 7, FGs x3) as a percentage of that maximum with this simple formula
Daily discussion question: What are some Cowboys things you have shared with your Dad, Fatherly Figure, or with your children?
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