The Colts signed linebacker Buddy Johnson off the Cowboys’ practice squad, the team announced Tuesday.
They waived linebacker Cameron McGrone in a corresponding move.
Johnson has spent the season with the Cowboys and has seen action in one game. He played 18 special teams snaps against the Eagles in Week 1.
Johnson has appeared in 21 career games in his time with the Cowboys (2023-25), Bears (2023), Texans (2022), 49ers (2022) and Steelers (2021-22). He has totaled two solo tackles and 12 special teams stops.
He entered the NFL as a fourth-round pick of the Steelers in 2021 out of Texas A&M.
McGrone signed with the Colts off the Patriots’ practice squad on Dec. 20, 2022. He has played 26 career games in his time with the Colts (2022-25) and Patriots (2021-22).
McGrone has totaled four tackles and nine special teams stops. In 2025, he saw action in all four games and registered one solo tackle and one special teams stop.
Cowboys wide receiver George Pickens never expected Sunday’s game against the Packers to end in a tie. Because he never knew an NFL game could end in a tie.
Pickens told Jane Slater of NFL Network immediately after the game that he was puzzled when the game ended after 10 minutes of overtime, because he assumed when the Packers kicked the tying field goal at the end of overtime that they would then play a second overtime period.
“I’ve never been a part of a tie in my life. I didn’t even know football worked like that,” Pickens said. “I thought we just would start another quarter right now and keep going. But a tie? That’s a first time, yeah.”
It’s surprising that NFL players don’t know the rules — and surprising that coaches don’t make sure players know the rules, as understanding that the game is over if it’s tied at the end of overtime can be important for players to know for strategic and clock management purposes.
But Pickens is far from the first player not to know the rules. Many NFL players have acknowledged that they didn’t know about tie games until they played in one, most famously then-Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who admitted after a 2008 tie that he had no idea ties happened in the NFL.
After all the attention paid to Sunday night’s Packers-Cowboys tie, you’d hope every NFL player now knows a game can end tie. But there’s a good chance that the next time a game ends tied, more players will reveal they just learned it was possible.
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.
