On the first day of the NFL draft, Ian Rapoport of NFL Network reported that Cowboys receiver George Pickens will sign his one-year, $27.298 million franchise tender.
While he still may, he has not yet done it.
Todd Archer of ESPN reports that Pickens has yet to sign the tender.
Technically, a player simply needs to accept it. That can happen via email, for example. Regardless, until the tender is accepted, the player is not under contract.
Accepting the tender puts the player under contract. He can be fined for skipping the lone annual mandatory minicamp. He can be fined for holding out from training camp, and for skipping preseason games.
There are multiple potential motivations for accepting the tender early. A player could decide to fully commit himself to having a big year, setting the stage for becoming a free agent again the following year.
In Pickens’s case, it’s more likely that the Cowboys would simply tag him again. By rule, he’d be entitled to a 20-percent increase over his 2026 pay. That’s $32.75 million — and still far below the current market rate of $42.15 million annually.
Accepting the tender also would allow the player to be traded. And perhaps the premature news was leaked to goose the possibility of someone offering the Cowboys something for Pickens during the draft.
Here’s the most important thing to remember when it comes to a potential Pickens trade. If it happens after July 15, the new team would not be able to sign him to a multi-year contract. That’s the deadline that applies to any franchise-tagged player — no multi-year deal after July 15. (It’s possible that the player could sign a multi-year offer sheet after July 15; that’s never been tested and isn’t relevant here, since no one has shown any inclination to potentially give up two first-round picks for Pickens, if an offer sheet isn’t matched by the Cowboys.)
In other words, a Micah Parsons-style outcome (with a trade during the preseason) is impossible, unless the new team would take Pickens in August and accept that it’s a one-year arrangement with exclusive negotiation rights after the season ends and the ability to tag him again the following year as a fallback.
The Cowboys signed three veteran players to one-year deals, the team announced Monday.
Wide receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling was previously reported, but the Cowboys also signed wide receiver Tyler Johnson and linebacker Curtis Robinson.
Johnson, 27, spent last season with the Jets. He played 12 games with five starts, seeing action on 292 offensive snaps.
Johnson made 12 catches for 197 yards and a touchdown in 2025.
He entered the NFL as a fifth-round pick of the Buccaneers in 2020, and he spent two seasons with them, one with the Texans, two with the Rams and last season with the Jets.
Johnson, who won a Super Bowl ring in Tampa, has 88 receptions for 1,025 yards and five touchdowns in his career.
Robinson, 27, has played 29 games with three starts in five seasons. He has seen time with the Broncos and 49ers, and Robinson started for the first time in his career with San Francisco last season when he played a career-high 248 snaps.
Robinson has played 335 defensive snaps and 432 on special teams and has 52 tackles and a pass defensed.
The Cowboys added a receiver late in the draft over the weekend and now have added a veteran to the mix.
Dallas has signed receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling, according to the transaction wire.
Valdes-Scantling, 31, split last season between the 49ers and Steelers. He appeared in five games each for San Francisco and Pittsburgh, catching four passes for 40 yards for the 49ers and 10 catches for 80 yards with a TD for the Steelers.
A fifth-round pick in 2018, Valdes-Scantling has caught 219 passes for 3,686 yards with 21 touchdowns in his career.
The Cowboys rained on Pittsburgh’s draft parade on Thursday night, by trading out of the No. 20 spot and allowing the Eagles to draft receiver Makai Lemon at a time when the Steelers had Lemon on the phone.
A report emerged that the Steelers weren’t happy with the Cowboys for giving the pick to the team that plucked Lemon. On Saturday, the powers-that-be in Dallas addressed that claim.
Via Jon Machota of The Athletic, Cowboys executive Stephen Jones said, “That’s not right.” Cowboys owner and G.M. Jerry Jones added, “Not at all.”
“I don’t want to get on their bad side,” Jerry Jones said. “I’m sorry if they’re mad. But, boy, I’ll tell you what, we’ve had it happen to us a bunch of times. It [was] traded right out from under us.”
Jerry Jones explained that the Cowboys traded up one spot in round one with the Dolphins to avoid being jumped by someone else for safety Caleb Downs. That’s how the draft works. All’s fair. There’s no reason for the Steelers to be upset. If they really wanted Lemon, they should have traded up to No. 19 or higher.
The draft is a free for all. A Battle Royale. Every team for itself. If you get jumped by a team that trades up, the last team to be pissed at is the team that traded down.
That’s how the draft goes. Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t understand how the draft works. And if Steelers owner Art Rooney II is upset with Jerry Jones, Rooney shouldn’t be.
Our guess, with all due respect to the report that the Steelers are upset, is that the Steelers are embarrassed by the fact that their effort to draft Lemon became a public spectacle. But they aren’t — and shouldn’t be — upset with the Cowboys for exercising their absolute right to trade down.
Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers offered some real-time reactions to the team’s first-round picks on Thursday night and they led to a conversation with head coach John Harbaugh.
Nabers appeared on a Bleacher Report livestream with Packers edge rusher Micah Parsons and said he loved fifth overall pick Arvell Reese as a player but wondered “where does he play” on a team that already has Brian Burns, Abdul Carter and Kayvon Thibodeaux on the edge. The Giants took offensive lineman Francis Mauigoa with the 10th pick and the Cowboys traded up to take safety Caleb Downs one pick later.
“I’d rather get him than play against him,” Nabers said of Downs.
On Saturday, Harbaugh said he had a “great conversation” with Nabers and that the wide receiver was “fired up and happy” about the team’s moves. He also said he welcomed the conversation about Reese because he knows that Nabers isn’t going to be the only one with questions about how the Giants plan to fit him into their defense.
“It’s like he said, I was curious about how you were going to use him,” Harbaugh said, via a transcript from the team. “I showed him how we’re going to use him. He is fired up about it. I appreciate it. You know, one thing that you’ll kind of probably see as we go here, we don’t get too worried about stuff. You know, as long as a person’s heart is in the right place, as long as the person really cares, a player, a coach, or anybody, you really want what’s best for everybody, you’re coming from -- he has a good heart and a good place, you know, say what you think. Put it out there. We talk all the time about confronting everything that has to do with our football. So Malik wants to know how we’re going to use our first round pick, I want to show him. I want to explain it to him. The fact that he says it publicly, who cares? I know fans are probably thinking the same thing. It was the same question that everybody is going to have, and we knew that, because we knew how kind of Arvell was perceived.”
The Giants will see Downs twice a year as long as he’s in Dallas and that may not put a smile on Nabers’s face, but it will be easier to deal with any disappointment if Reese and Mauigoa blossom into the kind of players the Giants believe they can be.
