The list of Cowboys needing offseason surgery has grown by one.
Defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence, who led the team with eight sacks in 2015, has had surgery to repair a back injury, via the Dallas Morning News. The condition, which didn’t prevent the 2014 second-round pick from playing, left him on the injury report for most of the second half of the season.
Agent David Canter expressed a high degree of optimism on Twitter: “Just a public service announcement @TankLawrence is 100% and will be good to go and have a huge season #muchadoaboutnothing.”
Cowboys coach Jason Garrett offered a more measured assessment to the team’s official website.
“It was something that bothered him for a lot of the year,” Garrett said. “He obviously played through it, but he was dealing with it a little bit. . . . We expect him to be back fairly soon. We’ll see. We don’t want to put it definitively, but we think he’s going to be OK.”
Crawford has plenty of time to recover, since the offseason program doesn’t open until April. Even then, the first few weeks consist simply of lifting and running, with no meetings or organized preparations for the coming season until the latter phases of the voluntary process.
Still, the sooner Crawford is ready to go, the better. As David Helman of the team’s official website notes, Crawford is the only defensive end currently under contract with a sack on his career regular-season resume.
Receiver Dez Bryant has had surgery on the foot he broke in Week One, and quarterback Tony Romo still may have surgery to attach a plate to his collarbone, which he broke twice during the 2015 season.