It’s franchise tag week in the NFL world. Starting Tuesday, teams can slap a one-year, fully guaranteed contract on a would-be free agent. Last year, we saw it with the Chiefs and Trey Smith, and the Bengals and Tee Higgins. This year, it’s looking a whole lot like we’re going to see it with the Cowboys and George Pickens.
For 31 teams and for just about any other player, a season where you have the third-most receiving yards and the eighth-most receptions would earn you a multi-year contract and a blank check… But this is the Cowboys and Pickens we’re talking about; they’re both psychopaths in their own right. ESPN’s Todd Archer reported that Pickens was fined for “being late to things” last season. When you’re potentially throwing around massive amounts of long-term money at a guy, you’d really rather have that not be a thing.
Are late fees enough of a reason to franchise tag a guy?
Going into last season, it was incredibly easy to say that George Pickens wasn’t going to fit in the Cowboys offense. They already had a WR1 with CeeDee Lamb, and the second he realized that he wasn’t going to be the team’s top option as a pass catcher, he was going to throw a hissy fit on the sideline and quit…
And then Lamb hurt his ankle in Week 3. If there were ever a situation where you could say, ‘Man, that injury came at the perfect time,’ it was that one.
It was early enough in the season that Pickens was engaged, and he slotted right in as the dominant WR1 that we all kind of knew he could be. In the three games without Lamb, Pickens had 26 catches for 359 yards and four touchdowns.
It became very clear that Dak Prescott had confidence in Pickens and that the offense was still going to have a disgustingly good passing game.
It wasn’t until around Week 14, when Dallas’ season fell apart for the third time, that Pickens really started to look like he was fed up with everything. You don’t want any player to show that kind of emotion, but it was huge growth for him to wait until that late in the season.
So on the field, he was doing a lot better. Off the field? Eh, turns out maybe there’s a reason for hesitation.
At the very end of Todd Archer’s article about the ins and outs of franchise tagging Pickens, he mentions Brian Schottenheimer’s allusions to Pickens being late to things, and that he was fined. We knew that something wonky happened before that Week 11 game in Las Vegas. Lamb said that he and Pickens broke a curfew and got benched for the first drive of their 33-16 blowout of the Raiders.
At the time, we as a collective football society thought, ‘Those guys are super bummed about that. They got grounded and didn’t have to be on the field for the first three-and-out. They only had a combined 210 receiving yards instead of the 212 they would’ve had.’
Apparently, they weren’t fined for that; it was just the incredibly soft-benching. That makes sense, though. They were in Vegas, and it’d be incredibly unchill to fine a guy for going out having dinner, and (probably, but not confirmed) losing money at a table game.
All this to say, if Schottenheimer is alluding to Pickens being late to things, it’s not the Vegas situation, and it’s probably something different. You can forgive a 24-year-old millionaire for doing things a 24-year-old millionaire does… but being late for team things? Buddy, that’s a big no-no.
It feels safe to say that in most cases, guys who do that boneheaded stuff aren’t the kinds of guys who are completely worthy of the mega-contracts.
Is that enough for the Cowboys to justify not giving him a contract? Absolutely. Is that something that they would use as a reason not to give him a contract? Probably. Is that fair? Kind of, yeah.
This isn’t to say that the Cowboys are some kind of juggernaut business that capitalizes on every good player who walks through their door; they’re actually the exact opposite of that. But, if you know that Pickens has a history of catching on fire and you smell a little bit of smoke here and thereand then let people know that you smelled the smoke… it makes sense that you should be a little cautious about making sure he sticks around.
It’s going to be interesting to see the wake of this stuff: if they wanted to slap a franchise tag on him and then turn around and trade him, you would think they’d try to make him seem like a rehabilitated angel. Maybe that means they don’t want to trade him, and the tag is going to be a second ‘prove it’ deal type of thing. Time will tell.
