The Dallas Cowboys are not going to the playoffs, and after Sunday’s 34-17 home loss to the Los Angeles Chargers, don’t seem all that interested in going into the ensuing offseason that’s sure to be full of drama with any good vibes at all. There hasn’t been much of anything that’s been consistent for the Cowboys this season, not in the big picture and not within the play of any one position group. The Week 16 loss to the Chargers guarantees the Cowboys cannot having a winning streak this season that is longer than any of their losing streaks, with the current one being at three games and just two games remaining to play. The Cowboys won three in a row directly before the start of this active three-game losing skid.
There is going to be ample time once the NFL playoffs begin with Dallas on the couch to break down Brian Schottenheimer’s first season as head coach and offensive play-caller, and diving into the final statistics of the season will be one of these ways. There’s no way around the fact this is a bad team on the field right now, and many of the defensive stats will reinforce this, but not all stats will back this up especially when looking at the offense.
With six catches on seven targets for 51 yards against the Chargers, CeeDee Lamb surpassed 1,000 receiving yards for the fifth season in a row. With Lamb over 1,000 receiving yards and George Pickens already surpassing this mark, the Cowboys have a pair of 1,000 yard receivers for just the fourth time in franchise history. Their most recent instance of this happening was 2019 with Amari Cooper and Michael Gallup.
The Dallas Cowboys have never won a playoff game in any of these four seasons
That’s right. In recent history from the transitions but continuity-mindful changes from Kellen Moore to Mike McCarthy to Schottenheimer, the Cowboys wasting top-ranked offenses as a whole is unfathomably nothing new, but seeing it specific to their talent at receiver is more shocking.
The Cowboys missed the playoffs with eight wins in 2019, a mark they’ll need to win out to achieve this season. Going back even further, the Cowboys had Terrell Owens and Terry Glenn surpass 1,000 yards in 2006, went to the playoffs at 9-7 but lost to the Seahawks in the Wild Card round. Drew Pearson and Tony Hill in 1979 were the only other Cowboys receivers to do this in the same year, and that 11-5 team lost their first playoff game to the L.A. Rams as well.
There was legitimate reasons for hope that something was different this season about the duo of Lamb and Pickens, but also times where one was without the other on the field, and now in back-to-back home losses a Pickens 38-yard touchdown feels like the only real impact play made by either despite what the final stats say. It also doesn’t help that the Cowboys went scoreless for longer than two and a half quarters following that Pickens touchdown against the Chargers to lose control of the game completely.
It is obviously far, far, far too early to rule out the 2026 Cowboys from being a contending team, but with the state of the roster right now, adding a retool at wide receiver to an already daunting list of needs feels like something that could also sink this contending status before it ever gets off the ground. Second-year player Ryan Flournoy emerging here will be one of the best bright spots of this 2025 season, but that is within the context of what he’s done as a third option behind Lamb and Pickens.
This problem of the Cowboys somehow, some way not knowing how to either reach the playoffs or win a game when they get there with more than one 1,000 yard receiver points to a bigger problem that has directly resulted in their underachieving this season.
On paper in the offseason, the Cowboys seemed to finally learn a valuable roster building lesson by flipping the script on how they support their best, cornerstone players. Instead of asking these players to carry entire position groups and be stars on every snap, the Cowboys added to positions of strength to make them even stronger and mimicked what the best teams in the league do to have depth in this way. Many of these moves have not worked out for a variety of reasons, sending the Cowboys back to the drawing board on how to actually execute an idea that’s still new to them. The position group where it is the least new is likely wide receiver though, and yet the combinations and permutations under Prescott have either been not talented enough, or really good but not when it matters most. Adding Lamb and Pickens to this “list” of sorts is a failure of a result all around from this tumultuous season.
Have the Cowboys not been balanced enough with the run when playing with these receivers, and in the case of how to fix that with this current team, will the defense ever be solidified enough to not force the team into constantly passing from behind? Perhaps most importantly, will the Cowboys decent process but poor results from this offseason to the regular season send them back into a shell to regress even more in multiple other areas?
The very idea that Lamb and Pickens will even be together for more than this just season is going to hang in the balance this offseason, and if we know anything about how the Cowboys handle these types of things, it will be hanging for so much longer than it needs to be. If the expectation remains that Pickens will re-sign though, the Cowboys still need to figure out beyond Lamb, Pickens, and Flournoy what the right ingredients are in the pass game. Whether that’s even heavier usage of their tight ends or finding a running back they can throw to with any regularity, Jaydon Blue or otherwise, are questions they can only scratch the surface of answering with the eight quarters they have left to play.
How Pickens remains engaged and fits into Schottenheimer’s culture will also be something to watch against the Commanders and Giants, after some negative progress there against the Lions and Vikings. Pickens got this arrow pointing slightly upwards again with his touchdown and 130 yards against the Chargers, but as the reality of these games being meaningless for the Cowboys drags on, it will remain something to monitor.
The Cowboys have also seen their promise to utilize KaVontae Turpin as a wide receiver more frequently not be worth the squeeze, and to make this matter worse haven’t gotten the gains in the return game from Turpin either. From a pure Xs and Os standpoint, there is a lot to like about what the Cowboys did under Schottenheimer this season, and more importantly where it could go in year two. There are also underlying concerns about the “Jimmies and Joes” that line up in the most important spots of this offense going forward, none of which may get the attention the total overhaul needed on defense will this offseason. History says the Cowboys having any playoff viability can depend most heavily on the work they do offensively though, especially feeling the pressure of still trying to reach the playoffs for the first time three seasons into the Dak mega contract.
We say ad nauseum that games need to be won and lost with a team’s best players on the field, and in the case of a QB the players that directly make the most plays for them are in that equation too. What the pass catching group looks like in Dallas next season is a question at the moment, but one that may remain under the radar for some time as well.
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