Practice Points: Under the lights at Ford Center – Staff Writers, DallasCowboys.com
Here are some of the big takeaways from Tuesday night’s practice at The Star.
3 the Hard Way: George Pickens is not of this planet, it seems. You’re hard-pressed to escape a practice wherein he doesn’t generate a highlight of some sort, and the Cowboys’ return to Frisco was no different. Dak Prescott dropped back and unleashed a bullseye of a throw downfield that Pickens brought down over his shoulder, and the defender, at the sideline while keeping both feet inbounds with a falling toe tap. Whew.
(- Patrik Walker)
Safety Blankets: From the first two plays of team period in Tuesday’s practice, the Cowboys safety duo of Donovan Wilson and Malik Hooker made a statement. Wilson made back-to-back would be TFLs on run plays, getting to the outside to make a play and plugging up the middle too. Later on, Malik Hooker forced a fumble on Rivaldo Fairweather, recovered it and would’ve brought it back for a scoop and score in a real game setting. Brian Schottenheimer has praised the two of them over the course of camp, and they continue to show up. (- Tommy Yarrish)
Running back splits: In the first large team period of practice on Tuesday, the Cowboys ran 19 run plays on 53 total offensive snaps. The splits between the running backs went as follows: Javonte Williams – 6, Jaydon Blue – 4, Miles Sanders – 3, Deuce Vaughn – 3, Malik Davis – 2, Phil Mafah – 1
In a running back battle that’s a tight race going into the final preseason game, these reps in practice and Friday’s game against the Falcons are growing in importance. (- Tommy Yarrish)
Schoonmaker exits: The Cowboys were down another tight end for the end of Tuesday’s practice when Luke Schoonmaker left the field and went to the locker room room. The Cowboys didn’t have an official word on the third-year tight end but it did leave them shorthanded, especially with Brevyn Spann-Ford still banged up with an ankle injury. That gave plenty of extra reps to backups Princeton Fant, Rivaldo Fairweather and Tyler Neville, who got into an intense scuffle with Damone Clark and other members of the defense during a play in the team drills. (- Nick Eatman)
Jaydon Blue cleared to make preseason debut vs. ATL – Patrik Walker, DallasCowboys.com
The Dallas Cowboys rookie running back from Texas is set to take the field for the first time this weekend.
Blue was a full participant and looked back to his usual self, and with no restrictions or limitations, also revealing he’s been medically cleared to take on the Falcons.
“Oh, I’m playing,” he said, an ear-to-ear grin accentuating his excitement.
It’ll be interesting to see how head coach and offensive play caller Brian Schottenheimer will determine his rotation of running backs on Friday, considering the addition of Malik Davis and the return of Miles Sanders from injury last week — also factoring in the emergence of the Cowboys’ other rookie halfback, Phil Mafah, along with Deuce Vaughn seeking playing time as well after missing time with a hamstring injury.
But, for Blue, it’s all about making most of whatever opportunities he’s given, in the only preseason game he’ll participate in.
“It felt great being back out here,” he said after Tuesday’s practice. “… I was having a great camp before I went down. I know a lot of these guys and the coaches know what I can do on the football field. I’m just ready to showcase that in a game this Friday.
Adam Schefter: Cowboys, Micah Parsons headed for ‘divorce at some time’ – RJ Ochoa, Blogging the Boys
The Cowboys trading Micah Parsons would be worse than the Dallas Mavericks trading Luka Dončić.
On Monday it was noted by ESPN’s Adam Schefter that there was no reason to think that the Cowboys and Parsons will get a deal done before the season opener on September 4th. You never want to hear that kind of thing, but those sorts of statements were made about Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb in certain respects last year so it didn’t exactly cause panic.
It may not be time to hit the actual button, but we might need to lift the glass casing that surrounds it. Schefter offered another note on this saga on Tuesday and it was caught by Bobby Belt of 105.3 The Fan. Schefter said that it sounds like the Cowboys and Parsons are headed for a divorce “at some time.”
This is an admittedly ambiguous statement and likely a hedge of sorts from Schefter in the event that a deal ultimately gets done. While we could read into the “at some time” in a very literal way, it seems that the implication here is that the Cowboys and Parsons could ride out the 2025 season as is (with Parsons on the final year of his rookie contract) and set up a world for more negotiations next year with the franchise tag as an option.
Dallas could go as far as tagging Parsons a second time in 2027 if they so chose (the path the franchise went with Dak Prescott during his first extension negotiations) which is the leverage that the team has. They have some years of unavoidable team control over Parsons in a contractual sense.
This is where things have begun to veer off into a different path than Prescott or Lamb took last year, as Belt also noted. People keep saying things about how this negotiation “feels different” but we are now at a place where actual different language has been used.
The Dallas Cowboys Always Win the Battle for Attention – Emmanuel Morgan, New York Times
Love them or hate them, the Cowboys will always be the center of the football universe.
Jones’s life is the subject of an eight-episode docuseries, “America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys,” that premieres Tuesday on Netflix. It explores his ownership of the Cowboys through the prism of the 1990s, when the team won three Super Bowls and cemented its passionate fan base.
In an interview with The New York Times, Jones, 82, said he had applied the lessons he gleaned from his father.
“My dream from the get-go was to try and create ways, 365 days a year, for people to engage in what we’re doing,” Jones said.
The Cowboys have extended their reach beyond the five-month N.F.L. season for decades. In 1992, Dallas became the first team to allow a camera into the room when team executives selected a player during the N.F.L. draft. Since 2006, the auditioning process for the team’s cheerleaders has been recorded for a reality television series.
The docuseries is an ambitious project by NFL Films, the league’s entertainment arm, which created a joint venture with the Hollywood studio Skydance Media in 2022. It also gives Netflix another buzzy title to bolster its growing ambitions for sports programming.
Streaming services have been searching for the football version of “The Last Dance,” the 10-part ESPN and Netflix film on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls that became a cultural phenomenon in 2020. Last year Apple TV+ produced a similar project on the New England Patriots, who won six Super Bowls this century.
