As the deadline for teams to pick up fifth-year options for 2020 first-round picks looms in less than two weeks (May 3), the Cowboys will extend CeeDee Lamb‘s contract through 2024. The team made the expected decision to exercise Lamb’s option.
We heard early last month the Cowboys were heading in this direction, and it will cost the Cowboys $17.99MM. Lamb is tied to a $2.5MM base salary this year and a $4.5MM cap number. Should Lamb play on the fifth-year option in 2024, the Cowboys will have a much higher cap hit on their payroll.
Although Lamb, 24, has two Pro Bowls on his resume, the first of those — in 2021 — came as an alternate. Regarding the four-tiered fifth-year option structure, Lamb being voted to the 2022 Pro Bowl Games as an original invitee places him on the second tier. Players voted to the Pro Bowl twice in their first three years comprise the top tier of the option structure, which came to be as part of the 2020 CBA.
The Cowboys have done well to identify first-round talent over the past several years. Lamb earning a Pro Bowl invite during his first three seasons follows the likes of Tyron Smith, Travis Frederick, Zack Martin, Ezekiel Elliott, Leighton Vander Esch and Micah Parsons. The Cowboys gave Smith, Frederick, Martin and Elliott extensions — which reduced their cap hits before their fifth-year option seasons — and the team wants to extend Lamb as well. The Cowboys will aim to extend their top wideout at some point in 2023, Todd Archer of ESPN.com adds.
Despite rostering Amari Cooper and Michael Gallup at the time they chose Lamb 17th overall, the Cowboys going with a best-player-available strategy paid off. Gallup surpassed 1,100 receiving yards in 2019, and Cooper had just signed a five-year deal worth $100MM. But the Cowboys viewed Lamb, who went off the board after Henry Ruggs and Jerry Jeudy, as too talented to pass up. The Oklahoma product has proved the team correct. His 260 receptions through three seasons are the most in team history.
The Cowboys carried the Cooper-Lamb-Gallup trio for two seasons but dismantled it by trading Cooper to the Browns last year. Lamb became the team’s aerial centerpiece in 2022, and his 1,359-yard year make it fairly easy to predict both the option will be exercised and extension talks will commence. Lamb, who led the 2021 Cowboys in receiving with 1,102 yards, has put himself in position for a lucrative extension.
Dallas has since traded for Brandin Cooks, whom the team pursued last year. But with the Texans eating some of Cooks’ salary, the oft-traded wideout will not check in as a No. 1-level wide receiver on the Cowboys’ payroll. Cooks will count $6MM against Dallas’ cap in 2023 and stands to count $10MM against the 2024 cap. Should the Cowboys finalize a Lamb extension, it will cost more — on a per-year basis, at least — than Cooper’s pact did.
If the Cowboys cannot come to an extension agreement with Lamb this year, they now will have the 2024 offseason to do so as well. This also keeps the door open for a potential Trevon Diggs franchise tag next year. The Cowboys want to extend the young cornerback, but with Diggs being a former second-round pick, no option exists in his contract. The Alabama alum is going into a walk year. The Cowboys having used their franchise tag in each of the past six years certainly points to a Diggs tag being a reasonable scenario.
He was the best receiver in that draft. I still can’t believe that they traded away Amari.
Justin Jefferson and everyone else disagrees. He was the 2nd best tho.
Definitely should extend. Just don’t reset the WR market to do it.