The Cowboys are willing to make Brandon Aubrey the highest-paid kicker in NFL history. Aubrey, though, is seeking even more.
The team offered Aubrey a long-term deal with an average salary of close to $7.5 million, Calvin Watkins of the Dallas Morning News reports, but Aubrey wants nearly $10 million a season. Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker currently has the highest annual average of any kicker at $6.4 million.
The Cowboys and agent Todd France, who is also Dak Prescott’s agent, began talking about a deal for Aubrey before the start of the 2025 season. The sides, though, now are in a stalemate.
“We’ve been in talks with Aubrey for even before the season started,” executive vice president Stephen Jones said Monday. “It’s been a journey but we hadn’t been able to get to a point where we can all agree so hadn’t got it done, love to get it done.”
Aubrey, a restricted free agent, will now face public pressure after the team’s leak of the numbers. Whether it spurs Aubrey to take the offer remains to be seen, but regardless, he likely stays with the Cowboys for 2026.
The Cowboys are likely to place a second-round tender on Aubrey for $5.8 million for 2026 if they can’t reach agreement on a long-term deal, Todd Archer of ESPN reports.
Aubrey, 30, has made the Pro Bowl in all three of his seasons and has an NFL-record six field goals from 60 yards or longer. He has a career-long of 65 yards.
The Cowboys have a predicament.
They want to keep receiver George Pickens, but they don’t want to pay him fair market value.
And so they plan to use the collectively-bargained device that gives each team the power to keep one free agent per year from becoming a free agent.
They know they’re taking a calculated risk by squatting on Pickens for roughly $28 million in 2026, when the top rate at the receiver position has moved to $40 million. He’ll have the right to stay away from everything in the offseason, training camp, and the preseason. He can show up only days before Week 1 and get the full amount of his franchise tender (unless the Cowboys rescind it).
Cowboys executive V.P. Stephen Jones addressed the situation with reporters on Monday, and he was asked about the potential complications of Pickens deciding to respond to the team’s reliance on the terms of the CBA by doing the same thing.
“It crosses your mind,” Jones said, via Todd Archer of ESPN.com. “I mean a lot of the guys we’ve tagged participated in everything, Dak [Prescott] leading the way. He played under two of them. He never missed anything. Hopefully that’ll be the case here.”
It’s different for a quarterback. Prescott knew he needed to be fully invested in order to keep his value high. Players at other positions can, and often do, take a different approach.
Pickens had a spectacular season in Dallas. Paired with a high-end quarterback for the first time in his career, Pickens generated 1,429 receiving yards and earned second-team All-Pro honors. If he were available to be signed by anyone, what would he get?
Thanks to the franchise tag, no one will know.
The Cowboys may be betting on Pickens accepting a massive spike in pay (he made $3.656 million in 2025) and having another big year in the hopes of doing it again. But the Cowboys could simply tag him again, at a 20-percent increase over his 2026 salary.
There’s another way that Pickens can play it. He can show up late, take his $28 million, and hold in — not practicing or playing due to a chronic issue from years of playing football. That’s what Micah Parsons did last year, and it worked.
The problem for Pickens is that he can’t sign a long-term deal if he’s traded after July 15. Pickens won’t be able to put the Cowboys in checkmate the way Parsons did.
And even if the Cowboys are willing to convert the tag into a long-term deal, the starting point will be two years of the franchise tag (like it was for Dez Bryant). But with the tag so far behind the market, that may not be good enough for Pickens.
Pickens’s best play may be to demand a trade the instant he’s tagged, and to stick to it until he gets a market-level deal from the Cowboys. He also can say he will not play under the tag, no matter what.
The Cowboys will bank on Pickens not walking away from $28 million for 2026. There’s a risk they’re going to be guessing wrong.
The Cowboys agreed to a new contract with running back Javonte Williams over the weekend and they are poised to use the franchise tag on wide receiver George Pickens, but those aren’t the only pieces of business they are contending with ahead of the new league year.
Kicker Brandon Aubrey is set to be a restricted free agent if the team cannot sign him to an extension in the coming weeks. Aubrey has made over 88 percent of his field goals in three seasons with Dallas and he’s 35-of-44 from beyond 50 yards, which could make him a target for other teams even though restricted free agents have usually wound up staying put in recent years.
On Monday, Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said that the team has been in discussions about a new deal with the kicker for months without finding the common ground needed to get something done.
“We just finished up Javonte,” Jones said, via Jon Machota of TheAthletic.com. “We’ve been in talks with Aubrey since before the season started. That’s been a journey. We haven’t been able to get to a point where we can all agree so it hasn’t gotten done, but we’d love to get him done.”
If the Cowboys can’t extend Aubrey, they will likely tender him a contract as a restricted free agent. They could use the first- or second-round tender in order to guarantee themselves compensation if they choose not to match an outside offer for Aubrey’s services while the lowest tender would not give them anything back should Aubrey wind up leaving for another team.
Cowboys wide receiver George Pickens is the No. 1 player on PFT’s list of this year’s top free agents, but he won’t be hitting the open market next month.
The expectation has been that the Cowboys will use their franchise tag on Pickens and executive vice president Stephen Jones said on Monday, via Judy Battista of NFL Media, that the move will be finalized at some point in the next week.
“We think the world of him. We want him here,” Jones said.
The tag will keep Pickens from leaving the team as a free agent and will extend the window for the two sides to work out a long-term deal into July. Jones did not offer a timetable for getting such a deal done and he said, via Calvin Watkins of the Dallas Morning News, that he does not know if Pickens will attend offseason workouts if he’s set to play under the tag.
“We always want guys here,” Jones said. “We’ve franchised players before, obviously we want him here working with the team. It will work itself out in the coming weeks.”
The franchise tag for wide receivers will carry a fully guaranteed 2026 salary and cap hit of over $28 million. A long-term deal would cut the cap number down, but it remains to be seen if the two sides will be able to work one out.
Running back Javonte Williams bet on himself last year, signing a one-year, $3 million deal. He delivered, with a career-high 1,200 rushing yards.
His reward was a three-year, $24 million deal to remain with the Cowboys.
Since the Williams deal was the first significant contract signed by a looming free agent, it’s important to remember a few things as we approach new-contract season. The initial reports routinely overstate the true value of the contract. For example, the reported $16 million in guarantees for Williams surely aren’t fully guaranteed at signing, and there’s little about the structure of the deal. There could be a little fudging at play to make the deal look better than it is, with the reporters who rush to Twitter with the early information rarely if ever insisting on full and accurate details. (If they do, someone else gets the scoop.)
For now, even the potentially inflated initial reporting reinforces an important point: The running back position continues to be undervalued.
The deal, if it’s truly worth $8 million per year, puts Williams at 16th among all current running backs. And while he took the offer before the annual tampering festival in Indianapolis, it’s believed that the offer the took was the best one he was going to get.
It’s also possible the Cowboys tried aggressively to get Williams signed before he could hit the market, perhaps by trotting out their CBA-violating practice of negotiating directly with the player. Or by making it clear that they’ll find another cheap veteran running back in the second or third wave of free agency, when players sign modest one-year deals.
Still, what would Williams have gotten on the open market? The absence of state income taxes in Texas are a factor. (Most players only care about APY, and that’s often a mistake.) Only the superstars at the position get market value. Eagles running back Saquon Barkley leads the way, at $20.6 million per year. 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey’s current deal has a new-money average of $19 million.
It happens for one very simple reason. The supply of capable running backs outweighs demand. Teams can resort to the draft for a younger, cheaper, and usually healthier player in lieu of paying a veteran who may not be able to duplicate his performance in a contract year.
Every year, college football generates plenty of running backs who can play at the NFL level, if they can be trusted to hold onto the ball and if they are able to pick up blitzers in pass protection. Most of them have their best years under slotted rookie contracts. When those expire, teams look for another young player to replace them.
The Williams contract gives other teams a data point that will become relevant to their negotiations with running backs. The other players who’ll be trying to get paid (Kenneth Walker III, Breece Hall, Travis Etienne, Rico Dowdle, Rachaad White, Isiah Pacheco, JK Dobbins) will have to deal with the argument that a guy who rushed for 1,200 yards in 2025 got only $8 million per year. (The counter would include that Williams isn’t much of a factor in the passing game, and that he lacks breakaway speed.)
Then there’s Lions running back Jahmyr Gibbs. Currently eligible for a second deal, he has shown the kind of superstar ability that would justify a market-level contract.
And how about Falcons running back Bijan Robinson? Repeatedly called the best player in the entire league by his former head coach, Raheem Morris, Robinson will be in line for a superstar contract, too.
Will the Williams deal hold down what the Lions will offer Gibbs and what the Falcons will offer Robinson? It shouldn’t be a factor, at all. Gibbs and Robinson are far closer to Barkley and McCaffrey than the players who are hitting the market. Still, all running backs who are ready to become free agents will have to deal with the fact — as underscored by the Williams deal — that the running back market continues to be not what it could be, or perhaps what it should be.
