The Cowboys got exactly what they wanted from George Pickens in 2025. Now they want more.
Dallas traded for Pickens ahead of the 2025 NFL season, and he delivered a huge first year with the team. As the 2026 season gets set to begin in Week 1 against the New York Giants, the Cowboys are already looking at a different way to use him.
ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler says Dallas is “hoping to unlock” a new layer of Pickens’ game: versatility.
“The Cowboys are hoping to unlock more versatility in George Pickens, a traditional outside receiver who is entering a key career stretch while on the franchise tag,” Fowler reports.
That likely means the Cowboys want to move Pickens around more instead of keeping him pinned to the boundary. Slot work is one obvious possibility, and Fowler noted that head coach Brian Schottenheimer wants to tweak the offense “about 15% to 25% from last season to keep sophisticated defenses guessing.”
“Part of the question is moving Pickens around.”
That kind of usage could matter a lot for a receiver who was mostly deployed outside last season. More snaps from the slot, more motion, more odd alignments - those are the kinds of wrinkles that could help Dallas squeeze even more out of a player who already produced at a high level.
Pickens finished last year with 93 catches for 1,429 yards and nine touchdowns. That’s a big number to top, which is why the Cowboys are clearly looking for ways to make his job harder for defenses without changing who he is.
However they draw it up, the upcoming season should show whether Dallas can turn Pickens from a dangerous outside threat into something even more difficult to handle.
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His peak came with five straight Pro Bowl nods from 2006 through 2010, the kind of run that tends to fade from memory unless you followed the team closely at the time. Gurode went on to brief stops with other NFL teams before eventually circling back to Dallas in 2019 as a defensive assistant coach, a reminder that some of the best Cowboys connections are the ones fans dont always think about first. [Read more 🡒]