Cowboys make move for Cooks, likely out on Beckham

After acquiring wideout Brandin Cooks from the Texans on Sunday, the Cowboys are expected to halt their pursuit of free agent Odell Beckham Jr., according to multiple reports.

“Brandin Cooks, CeeDee Lamb and Michael Gallup are the Big 3,” Dallas Morning News reporter Calvin Watkins tweeted.

The Cowboys sent a fifth-round pick in 2023 and a sixth-round pick in 2024 to Houston for the 29-yearold receiver, who expressed frustration when the Texans didn’t send him to another team ahead of the 2022 NFL trade deadline.

Instead, Cooks finished his third season with the team with 57 catches for 699 yards and three touchdowns.

The Cowboys weren’t one of the teams — a number that reportedly hovered between 12 and 14 — who attended Beckham’s offseason workout this month in Arizona.

But owner Jerry Jones told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that it didn’t mean Dallas had removed itself from the Beckham sweepstakes, revealing that he had spoken to the wide receiver’s mother and had a “very impressive [conversation] with the most important one in this whole proposition.”

“It was really easy for me to see where Odell got a lot of his pluses,” Jones said, according to the StarTelegram. “She was very impressive. You can see where he gets a lot of the things he has.”

If the Cowboys decide not to pursue Beckham after the Cooks trade, though, it’d mark a sharp pivot from rhetoric last season that suggested a deal between the two sides might’ve been a likely scenario — along with the Giants or the Bills, the other teams he visited ahead of the postseason while recovering from an ACL injury suffered in Super Bowl LVI while with the Rams.

Dallas, though, opted to sign veteran wideout T.Y. Hilton instead, the Bills added Cole Beasley, and the Giants relied on their current wideout group.

And the Beckham chatter subsided for a few weeks.

Beckham perhaps hinted at interest in a reunion with the Giants — where he spent the first five years of his NFL career — with a reply to Saquon Barkley on Thursday, in which he told the star running back to “Tell Joe [Schoen] to call my agent. I got some more shxt left to do.”

The Jets have also emerged as a team potentially interested in the 30-year-old, especially after Aaron Rodgers reportedly included Beckham’s name on a “wish list” alongside names such as Randall Cobb, Allen Lazard and Marcedes Lewis. The Jets have already acquired Lazard.