Cowboys Clips
A veteran receiver is hanging up his cleats.
The Cowboys placed Parris Campbell on the reserve/retired list on Wednesday, according to the league’s daily transaction wire.
Campbell, 28, was a Colts second-round pick in 2019. But he had a lot of trouble staying healthy in his first few years before playing all 17 games in 2022. That was his best season, as he caught 63 passes for 623 yards with three touchdowns.
Since then, Campbell has bounced around the NFC East. He played 12 games for the Giants in 2023 before winning Super Bowl LIX with the Eagles, appearing in all three postseason games for the club.
Campbell spent last season on Dallas’ practice squad, appearing in just one game.
In his seven seasons, Campbell caught a total of 123 passes for 1,117 yards with six TDs.
The Pro Football writers of America has selected Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott as its winner of the 2026 Good Guy Award.
Prescott was praised for his dealings with local and national media during the 2025 season.
Prescott, the 22nd Good Guy Award winner, is the first member of the Cowboys franchise to win the award.
Other finalists for the Good Guy Award were Browns guard Joel Bitonio and Bears safety Kevin Byard III.
The Good Guy Award is given to an NFL player for his qualities and professional style in helping pro football writers do their jobs. The award has been presented annually by the PFWA since 2005.
Prescott, a finalist for the Good Guy Award for the second time in the past three seasons (2024, 2026), is one of the more accessible players in the league, especially at the quarterback position. He fulfills his regular media obligations and then some, and he also chats with local media in an off-the-record format to provide context. The Dallas PFWA chapter named their local Good Guy award for Prescott – the chapter’s award recipient in 2017 and 2019 – starting with the 2025 presentation.
Cowboys offensive lineman Tyler Smith has been a guard for most of his career, but he has at times played left tackle, including the final three games of last season. This year, there’s been no official announcement about where Smith will play, but he says he’s confident the team will have him in the right place.
Smith said he sought out head coach Brian Schottenheimer to talk about his future, and he was satisfied with Schottenheimer’s answers.
“We had great conversations about it,” Smith told DallasCowboys.com. “I have an understanding of what it is. That’s the most I can ask for is to just have that understanding early on. Obviously, I’ve got the utmost faith that we’re going to go out there and we’re going to do what we’re going to do. Ultimately, I’ll be in the position I need to be in. I’m good with where we’re at.”
All indications are that Smith would prefer to play left guard, and that’s where the Cowboys prefer him to play, too — if Tyler Guyton is healthy enough to start at left tackle. But if Guyton, who has struggled to stay healthy so far in his NFL career, gets hurt again, it may be time for Smith to slide over to left tackle again.
As the expectations grow for the 2026 Cowboys, every second counts.
Coach Brian Schottenheimer knows it.
Via Neal Franklin of the Dallas Morning News, Schottenheimer is selling his house because it’s too far away from work. And because he wants something closer than 30 minutes away from the team’s headquarters, Schottenheimer’s current home in McKinney was put on the market for a mere $3.8 million.
It was listed on April 17. A buyer has already been found.
There’s no indication that Schottenheimer has found another place. Hopefully, it will be owl proof.
The deeper message is that Schottenheimer has prioritized getting the most out of every day. With 10 out of 32 teams changing coaches after the 2025 season, the NFL has never been more of a year-to-year proposition.
Which makes selling a house in order to move closer to work always better than selling a house to move out of town.
It’s one thing to ask Jerry Jones to install grass at AT&T Stadium, or to get him to temporarily not call it “AT&T Stadium.” Blocking out the sun would presumably be a bridge too far.
Not for the FIFA World Cup.
Via Margaret Fleming of Front Office Sports, Jerry World will block the sun for at least one of its nine World Cup matches. A FIFA spokesperson said blackout curtains will be used for an early-evening game to be played there.
It’s a sore subject for Jones. After receiver CeeDee Lamb said that the stadium should use curtains to keep the sun out of football players’ eyes, Jones went off.
“By the way, we know where the sun is going to be when we flip the coin, so we do know where the damn sun is going to be in our own stadium,” Jones said. “Let’s just tear the damn stadium down and build another one. Are you kidding me?”
Jones, who bent over backwards for soccer’s governing body, wasn’t about to refuse to accommodate the request.
It’s just another example of the bizarre double standard that some NFL owners will apply to players in a different sport.
Which should make Lamb and all Cowboys players turn Jones’s quote back against him: “Are you kidding me?”
Cowboys wide receiver George Pickens signed the non-exclusive franchise tag, but he hasn’t attended the team’s voluntary offseason workouts. It’s likely an indication that he isn’t happy playing on the one-year, $27.3 million tag that is fully guaranteed, and the Cowboys have made it clear they won’t negotiate on a long-term deal this year.
Pickens’ 1,429 yards and nine touchdowns justified the tag, but no other team has moved to attempt a trade with the Cowboys. The Cowboys — and every other team that might be interested in Pickens — is looking for an encore before committing the $30 million-plus per season it’s going to take to sign Pickens long term.
“This is great from our view,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told Jori Epstein of Yahoo Sports. “For him as well, it lets him really extend what he’s got going right now in light of the fact that . . . when we got him, we got him for no other reason than because there was a long-term question. Through next year and this year, he’ll answer all those questions.”
His inconsistency in Pittsburgh was the reason the Steelers offloaded a talented wide receiver for only a third-round pick. His habitual tardiness continued in Dallas, although he lived up to his potential on the field.
Now, it’s figuring out how much a team is willing to commit and for how long.
Nine wide receivers make more than $30 million annually, led by Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s $42.150 million average.
The Cowboys expect Pickens, in his second season with Dak Prescott, to show up and show out.
“We will expect more earlier,” Jones told Epstein. “He will expect more. That he not only build on where he got to last year, the preparation will be out there happening as a major part in any series or any game. So I think from the get-go, he will have more to give in the plans of what we’re doing early and late in the season.”
The Cowboys have not played an international game since 2014 when they traveled to London to play the Jaguars. That is the only international game they have ever played.
For the first time, the Cowboys will give up a home game to play internationally in 2026, traveling to Rio de Janeiro to take on the Ravens.
The game in Brazil will take place Week 3 in a demanding start to the season for the Cowboys.
They play Washington at home in Week 2 before a 10-hour flight to Rio and an 11-hour flight home. The NFL then is sending the Cowboys to Houston for a noon CT game the following Sunday, which is followed by a Thursday night game at home four days later.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones dismissed the idea that travel is a concern.
“The wear and tear is a lot less than a night out on the town,” Jones told Jori Epstein of Yahoo Sports on Tuesday from the league’s May meeting. “Everybody ought to think about that. Stop, stop. It isn’t like they [would be] home in bed resting up.”
The Cowboys also have a stretch where they play three games in 15 days — the Titans at home on Nov. 22 followed by a Thanksgiving Day game against the Eagles and then a Monday Night Football game at Seattle on Dec. 7. The Monday night game on the West Coast will shorten the Cowboys’ off week in Week 14.
“Part of being a player, part of being that-age person, part of being all of that shape they’re in and what have you, is they’re able to have a little extracurricular in many ways,” Jones told Epstein. “It can be a lot more damaging just walking down the block.”
On Monday night, the Giants held their annual Town Hall event. For the first time arguably since the days of Bill Parcells, the team has a good head coach who is also a clear and direct (and at times blunt) communicator.
Art Stapleton of USA Today has posted a snippet from the event that will be music to the ears of Giants fans.
Here’s the question to John Harbaugh, from one of the folks in the crowd: “We turn on the TV on Sundays, and then we face the Eagles and the Cowboys, and a lot of the time they just kick our butts. How confident are you, Coach, that going into this season we’ll go into those Dallas games, those Eagles games, and those Commanders games, and we’ll take them down?”
“I could care less about what’s happened last year, the year before that, or ten years before that,” Harbaugh said. “Honestly, I don’t give a crap about any of it. Not one bit. All I care about is tomorrow’s practice. Because if tomorrow’s practice is the way it’s supposed to be, that’ll be one more step in the direction of being a good enough football team to kick the Cowboys’ ass.”
And with that, the room exploded in cheers.
“That’s our job,” Harbaugh added. “That’s our job to be good enough to do that. We gotta make ourselves good enough to do that. That’s our responsibility.”
And the countdown to Week 1 continues. With the Cowboys coming to town to face the Giants in Harbaugh’s first game of his first year in New York.
While the proof will be in the proverbial pudding, Harbaugh has the fans more excited than they’ve been in a long time.
The stadium that periodically has an issue with sunlight from the outside now has a pink glow coming from the inside.
It’s part of the Herculean effort to equip AT&T Stadium — officially known through the end of the World Cup as Dallas Stadium — to prepare for nine upcoming matches in the world’s biggest soccer tournament.
NBC DFW recently took a close look at the work being done to transform the Cowboys’ venue into something that will comply with FIFA’s exacting requirements. The grass was grown in Colorado. A ventilation and irrigation system was installed beneath it. Pink lights hang over the pitch to help the grass grow.
The transformation will require 45,000 man-hours and 15,000 tons of material.
Whatever the expense, the powers-that-be have gladly incurred it as a cost of doing FIFA business. When the matches end, it’ll go back to the usual fake stuff that the vast majority of NFL players don’t want.
One such player currently plays for the Cowboys. Receiver CeeDee Lamb recently posted a plea for grass on Instagram.
It won’t be happening in Dallas, unless and until the Collective Bargaining Agreement compels it. And if the players push for it, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones will be at the front of the line that’s pushing. While the effort to secure high-quality natural grass won’t affect the teams that already have it, those that don’t will fight the hardest.
Even if, as Jones is, they’re spending millions for a short-term stint to install grass for fewer than ten international soccer matches.
One of the reasons the Cowboys can hope to have a better defense this season is the fact that linebacker DeMarvion Overshown isn’t rehabbing an injury right now.
After Overshown missed his rookie season in 2023 with a torn ACL, he returned to give the Cowboys an athletic and productive player in the middle of their defense. He had 90 tackles, five sacks, an interception return for a touchdown, a forced fumble and a fumble recovery in 13 games before suffering another knee injury. The recovery from multiple torn ligaments kept him out for most of last season, but he emerged from a five-game return without any more issues to deal with this offseason.
On Thursday, Overshown said that he believes the healthy offseason has him primed for big things in the fall.
“Biggest blessing I can ask for,” Overshown said, via Jon Machota of TheAthletic.com. “I feel like everybody knows when I’m healthy, I’m one of the best linebackers in the league. That’s not to toot my own horn, but the film and that stats speaks for itself when I’m on the field. Being healthy is the number one way to stay on the field and be able to do what I do. “The fact that I get to go through this whole offseason as a healthy man, and coming into training camp healthy, I feel like people ain’t seen my best yet. So, I know it’s going to be one of my best years.”
The Cowboys’ issues on defense last season went beyond missing Overshown, which was illustrated by the numerous moves they made to address that side of the ball over the last few months. Getting Overshown back to where he was a couple of years ago would still be a big step forward for the unit and things appear to be on the right track on that front.
