It’s a daunting task ahead for the Dallas Cowboys beyond the 2025 season. And it’s a position they are in that is no one’s fault but their own.
In trading a third round pick (2026) and a fifth round pick (2027) to the Pittsburgh Steelers to land wide receiver George Pickens, Dallas addressed a serious need at WR2.
This followed signing free agent running back Javonte Williams to address an opening at RB1 on the roster. Both moves have paid off in 2025.
Williams was projected to have 690 yards and seven touchdowns on 150 carries this season.
He already has 633 yards and eight touchdowns on just 124 carries. And we’re only halfway through the season.
Pickens has 43 catches for 685 yards and six scores so far.
He did a lot of his damage as WR1 when CeeDee Lamb went down for three games with an ankle injury.
Pickens is already well ahead of his 2023 pace, when he set career highs at 63 catches, 1,140 yards, and five scores. His trade has already paid off.
But both Pickens and Williams will be free agents in March.
And that’s where the Cowboys’ woes begin.
Can Dallas Have It All?
Is there a path forward where Dallas can retain both Pickens and Williams and still address the numerous holes on defense in 2026?
As things stand now, the Cowboys will have roughly $33 million in cap space in 2026.
If they try and tag either Pickens and Williams and sign the other, a large portion of that cap space is gone. Especially as a franchise tag on Pickens would set the team back $28 million alone in 2026.
One option would be to restructure Dak Prescott’s $74 million cap hit in 2026 to free up the money to retain Williams and Pickens.
Keeping both would almost ensure a strong offense for 2026 and beyond. But at what cost?
Overhauling The Defense
Dallas can wriggle out of Kenny Clark’s deal after this year without a dead cap hit. The same cannot be said of other players on the roster today that should not be at camp next year.
Yeah, we’re looking right at you, Mazi Smith.
Other players, like Sam Williams, Kaiir Elam, Ken Murray, and Jack Sanborn are free agents after this season and should not be resigned.
Those roster spots will need to be filled. Some can be via the draft.
But the Cowboys must go shopping for at least two solid free agents on defense next spring.
And they can’t be bargain bin signings either. Otherwise, we’re looking at 2025 all over again.
I’m glad your not the one running the Cowboys, we would be worse off than we ever have been!! You do know that we don’t have to use the franchise tag on Pickens or Williams, and if we did, the smart thing to do is to put it on Williams since he would be a lot cheaper!! And the franchise tags are usually meant for top players on the team, Pickens is a good player, but Ceedee is our top receiver!! Williams on the other hand is our number one RB, so it would make more sense to use the tag on him!! But we have plenty of cap space to sign both of them without using the tag!! That’s a big reason why trading Parsons was such a good idea!! Trading Parsons allowed us to free up a lot more cap space to sign players like Pickens and Williams!! And as far as the defense goes, there are no numerous holes that need to be filled, we have good players all over the defense, and we don’t have any defenders hitting free agency that we have to worry about, so we’ll still have the same players we have now!! Our problem isn’t the players, it’s the scheme they’re playing in!! And another thing is, why would we wanna get rid of Clark, he’s the best run stopper we have!! So getting rid of him would be stupid!! And another thing is, if you knew anything about football, you would stop talking crap about Mazi…. He can be a really good player!! His problem is that he has been stuck losing weight and then gaining weight and then losing weight again every year since he was drafted!! There’s no player in the NFL that’s gonna have to go through that much change and still be the player they were drafted to be!! And not only did he have to get used to playing at a different weight every year, but he had to deal with learning a new scheme every year too!! That’s too much for a young player to have to go through in his first 3 years in the NFL!! If these defensive coordinators would’ve just let him play at the same weight he played at in college, he would be a really good player by now but they couldn’t leave him alone!! The only one that was smart enough to let Mazi play at his normal weight was Mike Zimmer, and it started to show around week 10 when Mazi started getting a lot better last year!! But then Eberflus had to come in this year and make Mazi lose weight yet again and messed everything up!! So y’all writers can stop with the Mazi crap, because it’s not his fault he’s not the player he was supposed to be, that’s all on the stupid defensive coordinators that kept making him change his weight every year!!
Because under the current management the Cowboys have won so many Super Bowls, NFC Championships, and Divisional round games in the last 30 seasons… oh, wait…