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The Philadelphia Eagles just won the Super Bowl. As disgusting as those words all strung together may sound for Dallas Cowboys fans, it’s important to give credit where credit is due as the Eagles’ front office certainly deserves for the all-star roster they put together this year.
One area in particular where Philadelphia thrived was at receiver. They not only have one top-flight option in A.J. Brown but they a second elite WR in DeVonta Smith. They relied on the pair heavily in 2024 proving a team can never have too many playmakers on an offense.
As an exercise in self-reflection the Cowboys could learn something from their division rivals. The Cowboys have their version of Brown in CeeDee Lamb, but no one even remotely resembling Smith.
Jalen Tolbert, the closest thing Dallas has to a WR2, is nowhere close to Smith as a WR.
Now the good news is Tolbert has improved every season he’s been in the NFL. The bad news is he hasn’t been good enough for the Cowboys to confidently hand him the WR2 role in 2025. With last season’s No. 2 Brandin Cooks set to hit free agency this March, it puts the Cowboys in a bit of a predicament this offseason. Aside from Lamb, Dallas is left with nothing but projections in the WR ranks.
Jalen Brooks, Jonathan Mingo and Ryan Flournoy are all developmental projects for the Cowboys. All of them have the ceiling to rise to WR2 someday, but none of them have remotely shown enough to be projected as that at this point. It’s clear the Cowboys have to do something to address the position this offseason but with so many other roster needs finding the resources to adequately do so isn’t going to be easy.
2024 highlighted the need quite vividly. Hit by early injuries, Cooks only played in 10 games in 2025, catching 26 balls for 259 yards. Injuries were partially to blame but even when healthy his contributions were paltry. The season before was better, but even then, the Cowboys WR2 posted just 54 receptions for 657 yards.
The reality is the Cowboys haven’t had a solid receiving corps since they traded Amari Cooper to the Browns for a bag of nickels (actually a fifth-round draft pick) back in 2022. They banked on Michael Gallup to bounce back from injury that season and prayed Tolbert would develop quickly but neither solution worked out for them. Gallup is out of the league entirely and Tolbert hasn’t been consistent enough to rise anywhere above WR3.
What the Cowboys can’t do is bring in another type of WR they already have. Adding an undeveloped WR in free agency or drafting a midround prospect would be too redundant to be helpful. The Cowboys already have plenty of projects, what they need is a plug-and-play solution .
Whether that’s a player picked early in the 2025 NFL draft or a proven veteran free agent is unknown but it’s fairly clear at least one of those avenues have to be explored. Even with Brian Schottenheimer’s commitment to the running game, the offense needs a secondary option alongside Lamb to keep defenses honest.
It’s no mystery the teams who found the most success this season were the teams than ran two, three, even four players deep in the playmaker department. They were the offenses defenses couldn’t shut down because they were the offenses that had a pick-your-poison design to their offense.
WR is a major need for the Cowboys this season, not just because of the enormous hole that has to get filled but because there’s no inexpensive shortcut to achieve that goal. Some sort of major investment must be made.