‘This one’s sweet’: Brandin Cooks flirts with career-best day in Cowboys breakout

From @ToddBrock24f7: Cooks had his biggest day yet as a Cowboy and almost the biggest day of his career, racking up 173 yards in a 49-17 win over the Giants.

The last time Brandin Cooks had 170 yards receiving in a game, the 23-year-old was wearing a fleur-de-lis on his gold Saints helmet, and across the NFC, the Cowboys were wrapping up a surprising 2016 season under a rookie quarterback named Dak Prescott.

This past Sunday found the two on the same team- and definitely the same page- as Cooks tied the second-best day of his pro career and enjoyed his long-awaited breakout performance as a Cowboy.

“For him to have that production is awesome,” Prescott said Sunday after Dallas’s 49-17 thumping of the Giants. “That guy deserves it more than anybody. Amazing teammate, amazing friend, amazing guy. Does everything the right way, and he deserves that.”

Cooks ended the day with nine catches on 10 targets for 173 yards. This was after compiling just 165 yards over his first seven outings with the team.

It was the first time the six-time 1,000-yard receiver has produced like it since signing with Dallas. But Cooks maintains he didn’t do anything differently.

“Nothing. Just continuing to try to trust the process, like I’ve always said,” Cooks told reporters after the win. “The ball came my way, and I just wanted to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that I had tonight.”

The deep-threat playmaker certainly capitalized and was responsible for four of the Cowboys’ nine longest plays from scrimmage, posting receptions that gained 37, 34, 32, and 25 yards. But his best moment may have come on a 10-yard end-zone catch that he later called “a trust throw” from his quarterback.

It wasn’t Cooks’s first touchdown as a Cowboy. But he had far more targets and receptions on Sunday than in any game since arriving.

“It’s a blessing,” Cooks explained before quoting Scripture: “‘Don’t grow weary in doing good, for at the proper time, you’ll reap a harvest if you don’t give up.’ It’s been a hard, tough couple years, but my faith and my work ethic, my family- my wife and my kids- just continue to push me to keep going. This one’s sweet, for sure.”

“Practice, man,” is how Prescott credited the day he and Cooks had. “You know me, I always talk about practice, what we put into it. Going back to this game plan, going back to early in the week, I told him, ‘Let’s put the work in and it’s going to come out.’ He’s been there for us all year when we’ve needed him to, there’s been games where we’ve come back and said, ‘Could you have gotten him more involved?” Yeah, sure, maybe so, right? He’s that type of player that deserves those questions when he’s not getting those targets or getting those catches.”

The questions had definitely been coming, with Cooks on pace to set career-lows in both catches and yards for 2023… before Sunday’s stellar performance.

“I just think his opportunities came together,” Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy explained in his postgame press conference. “The protection part of it [is] we’re getting to where we need to be. We still have work to do there going off of last week, and we definitely took a step this week. And I think just with that, we were able to get into the the play types that we want to live in, and I think you’re seeing more of that here the last couple weeks.”

True. Don’t look now, but Cooks now has three touchdown grabs in his last four games.

Of course, part of Cooks’s quiet season had been because of the monster numbers being posted by fellow Cowboys receiver CeeDee Lamb. But despite setting his own NFL mark in Week 10 with double-digit receptions and 150-plus yards in a third straight contest, Lamb wanted to talk about his teammate’s near-record day.

“That was long overdue for Brandin. I couldn’t wait to celebrate with him enough,” Lamb said. “He deserved 200 [yards].”

Lamb knows that Cooks’s return to big-play form will only spread opposing secondaries thinner as they try to cover a growing array of weapons in Dallas, with Jake Ferguson and Michael Gallup also in the mix and even youngsters Jalen Tolbert and rookie Jalen Brooks coming on strong.

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“Each and every one of us can go up and go get it,” said Lamb. “Deep ball, deep threats. It’s all picking your poison.”

And if defenders elect to give The Archer just a little bit of space, Prescott will be right there to deliver more strikes to Cooks, now that he’s reminded everyone of the kinds of lights-out performances he can have.

“And he’ll have more of them, I promise you,” Prescott vowed. “It might not be an every-week thing, but he will have more of these games.”

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