Dallas Cowboys free agency rumors: “It would be an upset if Amari Cooper returns”

Amari Cooper’s time in Dallas could be coming to a close.

We are just a week away from legal tampering beginning in the NFL, and soon after the official league year will begin which will allow for teams and players to consummate new deals. It is expected that the Dallas Cowboys will sit back and watch the action unfold from the safe confines of The Star where player acquisition via free agency is reserved for later. The Cowboys will wake up after the first few days of free agency to sign their preferred value players, but they have no interest in taking any sort of big swings. History tells us this.

Where the Cowboys might be active early on is in waving goodbye to certain players. Some of these may include Dalton Schultz, Randy Gregory, Michael Gallup, or others as they are on expiring contracts, but they might also include players who they could move on from like Amari Cooper or DeMarcus Lawrence.

When it comes to Amari Cooper, there are strong rumors circulating.

“It would be an upset if Amari Cooper returns”

The 2022 NFL Combine is underway in Indianapolis and it tends to breed storylines given all of the networking that happens among league dignitaries.

A report emerged late on Thursday night from The Dallas Morning News that chatter from Indy is that the Cowboys’ wide receiver trio of Amari Cooper, Michael Gallup, and CeeDee Lamb have likely played their last game together and “it would be an upset if Amari Cooper returns” to the team.

The Cowboys believed last summer they were entering their final season with Amari Cooper, CeeDee Lamb and Michael Gallup all at wide receiver. Several months later, as the 2022 league year approaches, that belief is unchanged.

A split is considered all but a foregone conclusion.

Almost certainly, the band won’t be back together.

There are still too many moving pieces to say exactly how the situation will unfold, one person close to the situation cautioned Thursday. It could be Gallup who rejoins Lamb in Dallas. It could be Cooper. At this stage, however, the shared opinion from several sources at the NFL combine is it would be an upset if Cooper returns.

This day has theoretically been in the works since Dallas signed Cooper to the contract that he is currently playing on two years ago. The team left themselves a viable escape hatch in 2022 which is where we are now.

It is no coincidence that the Cooper fork in the road coincides with Michael Gallup’s contract expiring. The fact that Dallas wound up with CeeDee Lamb just a few months after setting this all into motion surely gave them more confidence in their future plan, and they might be in a position where they are simply trusting what they laid out two years ago.

While there is logic to adhering to a decision you made when you were not emotionally compromised the last two years – the time that Cooper, Gallup, and Lamb have played together – have shown statistically that Cooper is the best of the bunch. We have yet to see a Dallas Cowboys offense coordinated by Kellen Moore be truly elite without him and the unknown is a scary place to wonder in general, let alone in a season of such importance where the Cowboys find themselves at the moment.

The possibility exists that Dallas could recoup some sort of stock for Cooper by way of a trade. But Stephen Jones has been dropping bread crumbs left and right that this day was coming and teams could wait to see if the Cowboys will cut him instead of trade for him.