Cowboys wide receiver George Pickens said last week that he saw a “great opportunity” to show up for quarterback Dak Prescott and the rest of the team in CeeDee Lamb’s absence.
Pickens made the most of it against the Packers on Sunday night. He had eight catches for 134 yards and two touchdowns in the 40-40 tie, and he now has 21 catches for 300 yards and four touchdowns in his first four games with the team.
During an appearance on 105.3 The Fan on Tuesday, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was asked if Pickens’ production with Lamb out is going to be a major factor in talks about extending his stay in Dallas beyond this season. Jones said that wasn’t the case, but acknowledged there were questions about the wideout’s fit as a teammate after his time in Pittsburgh.
“He’s an exemplary teammate,” Jones said. “He is exemplary in his work preparation and you can see the results of that out there Sundays.”
Jones then pivoted to saying the team is in position to make a deal with Pickens that will keep him around.
“I’m proud to tell you that we’ve got some outstanding structure in our cap space that will allow us to do a lot of things that I didn’t think, when we finished this time time last year, that we might have the room to do some of these things we’re talking about doing,” Jones said. “We got it. We paid a price for it, we had to not sign some players our fans might have thought ought to be signed. We can do it now.”
Those conversations are likely to come after the season, but if Pickens keeps going at his current level it is hard to imagine the Cowboys are going to let him go.
Cowboys cornerback Caelen Carson hyperextended his knee in a July 27 practice. His prognosis was 4-6 weeks.
Nine weeks later, Carson told Calvin Watkins of the Dallas Morning News that he’s hopeful of practicing this week.
Carson said he can do everything physically and is waiting for the team’s medical staff to clear him to begin football activities.
He is on injured reserve and has missed the required four games, so the Cowboys can open his 21-day window at any point.
Carson, a fifth-round pick in 2024, played only six games last season before going on injured reserve with a nagging shoulder injury. He finished with 27 tackles and four pass breakups.
San Francisco’s Super Bowl LVIII decision notwithstanding, the conventional wisdom regarding two-possession overtime is that the team that wins the toss should choose to kick.
This choice requires more careful deliberation in the regular season, where the overtime period lasts 10 minutes and 10 minutes only.
The proposal that brought the postseason rules to the regular season initially included a return to 15 minutes. The league ultimately decided to stick with 10. Sunday night’s Packers-Cowboys game became the first data point as to the question of whether 10 minutes are enough.
They aren’t. The Packers were rushed at the end of their possession, nearly running out of time before ending the game with a mutually-dissatisfying 40-40 tie.
Coaches want the regular-season overtime rules to be the same as the postseason rules. While they’re never be identical unless and until the possibility of a tie is removed, 10-minute overtime entails different strategies and approaches than 15-minute overtime (which, obviously, becomes unlimited overtime in the postseason).
Yes, it generally makes sense to take the ball second. If the team that gets the opening kickoff scores, the other team will know what it needs. The team that has the ball second will, if the first team has gotten a field goal or a touchdown, go for it on fourth down in its own territory (as the Packers did last night, on fourth and six from their 24).
In the regular season, the ability to know what is needed must be balanced against the very real possibility of having the opportunity to leave the team that gets the ball second with insufficient time to match or beat a score.
The Cowboys used 5:20 of overtime to score their field goal. The Packers had 4:40 to respond. If/when a third possession happens after a pair of scores, there could be little or no time to get in position for a potential game-winning field goal.
A 10-minute overtime sets the stage for more ties. And no one should want more ties. No one should want any ties. Although ties can help avoid the complexity of tiebreakers in the final standings, football is always better when there’s a winner and a loser.
With only 10 minutes, that becomes harder to accomplish.
The NFL shortened overtime in 2017, after the Buccaneers played more than 73 minutes on a Sunday against the Raiders before turning around and playing the Falcons on Thursday. That change came when the NFL was fighting to quiet ongoing criticism of short-week football. Now that the P.R. war against Sunday-Thursday turnarounds has been won by The Shield, there’s no reason to not revert to 15-minute overtime.
So let’s go back to 15 minutes. It will create more apples-to-apples strategic decisions for both regular-season and postseason overtime, especially as to the critical threshold question of whether to take the ball — and whether to secure a chance to leave the team that gets the ball second without enough time to answer.
With 10-minute overtime, the clock looms large. With 15-minute overtime, it becomes less of a factor in the various decisions the teams will make, starting with the most important decision of whether to take the ball first, or second.
When two teams tie with a score like 40-40, as the Cowboys and Packers did on Sunday night, it’s much easier to find fault with the defenses than the offenses. But Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott said after the game he was looking mostly at his own failure to get into the end zone in overtime.
The Cowboys’ offense had a good first possession in overtime but ultimately had to settle for a 22-yard field goal, and Prescott said he wishes he had scored a touchdown, rather than giving the Packers the opportunity to drive into range for their game-tying field goal, which they lined up for with one second left on the clock.
“I believe in my defense,” Prescott said. “This game, yeah I can be mad about the one second on the clock, I can be mad that they drove the ball, but at the end of the day I’m pissed that we didn’t score in the red zone. We had an opportunity to score in the red zone. . . . Not for one second am I looking at the defense. I’m a guy that looks inward first, looks at what we need to do and what I need to do to help this team, and if we score in the red zone or start faster, who knows if we’re in this position.”
Prescott said he considers the tie disappointing because he knows the Cowboys had opportunities to win it. And when he thinks about missed opportunities, he’s thinking about the offense.
Cowboys owner and General Manager Jerry Jones said his team deserved to win for how well it played on Sunday night against the Packers.
Instead, the Cowboys and Packers tied 40-40, and Jones was disappointed to end up with a 1-2-1 record through four games, rather than 2-2.
“I’m proud of this bunch,” Jones said after the game. “They competed their tails off tonight. They competed out there at the end when they were tired. I’m proud of them. I thought we played well enough to win the game. I’m sick for these players, sick for these coaches and mostly sick for our fans that we didn’t bring home a win. But I am proud of the way we competed tonight.”
Jones particularly wanted Dak Prescott to get a win, saying he out-played Packers quarterback Jordan Love.
“To not come out with a W for that one is unbelievable for him,” Jones said of Prescott. “I thought he was the better quarterback tonight.”
The Cowboys played better than most people thought they would, but the Packers’ field goal as time expired took away the win Jones thought they deserved.
