Stephen Jones says locking in a long-term deal is still “on our radar,” but it will start with exercising Lamb’s fifth-year option by May 1. | From @ToddBrock24f7
Locking down wide receiver CeeDee Lamb’s place on the Cowboys roster for the foreseeable future with a contract extension is something the team has said they’re open to doing this offseason.
“Obviously, they’re in our plans long-term, executive vice president Stephen Jones went on record as saying back in February, referring to Lamb and his 2020 draft-classmate Trevon Diggs.
The first step to securing Lamb’s services beyond this season, though, is exercising the fifth-year option on his rookie deal. That would set his 2024 salary at $17.99 million. And all they have to do to flip that switch is say the word before May 1, the day after draft weekend.
But they haven’t done so yet.
“Well, obviously, our focus has been on keeping the guys who were free [agents], you know, keeping the guys that we could keep,” Jones told the K&C Masterpiece on 105.3 The Fan on Tuesday. “But we’re not able to, you know, always have a clean run. But as we said, we were certainly thrilled to get Dono[van] Wilson in the mix there. Certainly, we lost some tough ones in terms of Dalton [Schultz] and then, of course, Connor McGovern. But you know, that’s certainly our priority. As we move forward, that’ll become a bigger priority here as we move past the draft.”
To be fair, the Cowboys front office did have a busier free agency period than had become typical in recent years. They pulled off two major trades to get wide receiver Brandin Cooks and cornerback Stephon Gilmore, and they also managed to re-sign a majority of the players they wanted to keep.
So getting advance deals done on guys like Lamb and Diggs may not have been a big priority, especially with seven draft picks to prep for.
And who knows? The draft could potentially see a prospect come the Cowboys’ way that changes the club’s thinking on any player on the roster, and the Joneses do love to keep their options open as long as humanly possible.
Dallas is widely thought to be in the market for wide receiver help in this year’s draft, maybe even in the first round, where they lucked into landing Lamb in 2020. And if a Jaxon Smith-Njigba or a Zay Flowers ends up joining the Cowboys, well, that could theoretically change the team’s plans at the position.
But it’s a far safer bet that the team will simply exercise the fifth-year option on Lamb by the May 1 deadline… and then still sit down to re-work a longer-term contract over the summer. That deal would earn Lamb a higher payday but would ease the club’s scheduled $18 million 2024 cap hit.
That, Jones reminded, is something else the Cowboys front office loves to do. As Cowboys Wire documented earlier this month, the team took this same approach with Tyron Smith in 2015, Travis Frederick in 2016, Zack Martin in 2017, and Ezekiel Elliott in 2018. (It should be noted, though, that Elliott exercised some leverage of his own and stayed away from training camp after the fifth-year option was utilized. His mega-deal wasn’t inked until September of that year.)
“We’ve historically signed a lot of guys during that training camp period to extensions, but you know, guys like CeeDee Lamb and Diggs are certainly on our radar in terms of guys that we’d love to have around here for another five, six years, whatever that turns out to be.”
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