OXNARD, Calif. – With his one-year, $28.3 million franchise tag in place and no extension coming this offseason, Cowboys wide receiver George Pickens arrives at his second training camp with Dallas focused purely on football.
That focus did not begin when the team arrived to Oxnard, as Pickens has been preparing since the end of last season.
"I left it up to agents, so I was, even when we were nine, ten months from training camp, I was already thinking about ball, I was already training," Pickens said of getting his contract out of the way earlier in the offseason. "I kind of leave that to the people that can do that. For me, I just make catches, make plays, be a playmaker."
In the Cowboys' opening press conference on Tuesday, owner/GM Jerry Jones said that Pickens "could be a Cowboy for the rest of his career, and that'd be a long time." What did Pickens think of those comments?
"Super excited," Pickens said. "I'm always super happy when someone thinks highly of me, so shoutout to Jerry."
Dallas' offense thinks highly of him too, as Pickens went for 1,429 yards and nine touchdowns in his first year with the Cowboys last season. In their conversations together over the course of the offseason, Pickens said that the details are a key focus for the unit in 2026.
"I feel like the collective really brought my mentality to it too," Pickens said. "We all came in, we all talked, we were already having that nuance of we want to be better. Which is in anything, anybody else, they want to be better than what they did before. But detail is definitely one component that is always going to be there, so we harped on that."
With being one of the top offenses in the league last season, questions of how they take the next step will always follow. In Pickens' mind, there is no ceiling for what the unit that returns all 11 starters can do.
"That's the thing, the limitations and the nuance of a limitation, you shouldn't put that on yourself," Pickens said. "You can really do anything you want. I feel like as an offense, that's one thing and one mindset that we have. Just trying to be through the roof."
One way that the Cowboys are improving offensively is going up against a new look defense, both from a coaching standpoint with Christian Parker and his staff as well as from a personnel standpoint, with a plethora of new faces.
"Just new looks," Pickens said of going up against Dallas' remodeled defense. "Not really too much trouble, but iron sharpens iron, so plays here, they have a few plays, we have a few plays. They're surprising me the most because it's group of new guys, or a group of guys that we brought back, and now they're meshed together. We've even got [Caleb] Downs, who just got here, and he's meshed with seven-year vets. That's one of the things I think is super important."
When it comes to sizing up what defenders will do as he goes up against a new defense, Pickens points to the scheme being something he keeps an eye on while the player themselves can sometimes rely on their own habits.
"We've got a new defensive coordinator, so the scheme's a little different, but the player and his tendencies can be the exact same," Pickens said. "Just starting to watch what he does, if he repeats the same thing that he did the year before that or he's the same guy since college, so that's going to always be in that person. But the scheme is definitely new and improved."
Now, the Cowboys hope they can be new and improved as a collective going into Brian Schottenheimer's second year as head coach in 2026.
