Dallas City News

The Dallas Cowboys are reporting to training camp this week. We made it. Soon enough the California sun will be shining down while your pet cat is justifying the belief that you bestowed upon them. It is the best.

Experienced football fans are well aware of the optimism that this time of year offers. The canvas is blank, the slate is clean and our hearts have mended from last year’s breaking. Once action gets underway in Oxnard it is full steam ahead and all systems go.

But when everything starts up it is still unknown whether or not a certain wide receiver is going to be there. CeeDee Lamb has yet to take part in any official Dallas Cowboys activity throughout the offseason, but not showing up to training camp is a different sort of statement.

It feels more probable than not that CeeDee Lamb will hold out

It’s honestly difficult to envision CeeDee Lamb being a part of the charter to Oxnard when the Dallas Cowboys board it this week. We have yet to see Lamb in any official team capacity amid his contract negotiations with the team. If he was willing to miss voluntary stuff, OTAs and all of the “mandatory” minicamp, why would he suddenly blink just because training camp is about to start?

Beyond conventional logic applying here there is also recent history telling Lamb to keep up what he has going on. The two more notable holdouts in Dallas Cowboys training camp history featured players who are currently both active in Ezekiel Elliott and Zack Martin.

Zeke may be on his second go with the Cowboys but held out during his first in the lead up to his fourth training camp. At the time Elliott was eligible for a contract extension for the first time and leveraged that point. There was a fair bit of drama, shocker there, throughout the process including Jerry Jones toying with the media saying “Zeke who?” at one point (which he later sold t-shirts to promote after the deal was done), but ultimately the running back won with the team blinking to the tune of a record-setting $90M deal.

That holdout was somewhat predictable where Zack Martin’s was a bit of a surprise. Last year saw the future Hall of Famer decline to show up to training camp initially as he was seeking a new deal. Martin didn’t even miss all of camp and successfully negotiated an $8.5M raise for himself in guaranteed money. Players are two for two in the last five years.

So if you are CeeDee Lamb and you know that you have not shown up to anything so far and that the last two players who put the team in a corner successfully came out on top, why on earth would you show up? All due respect to Elliott and Martin, Lamb has even more leverage than either did at their particular junctures.

While Zeke was coming off of leading the league in rushing in 2019 (his second rushing crown through his first three seasons), the ultimate reality was still that he was a running back. That point was proven by the team releasing him last year as a result of the deal.

Martin will one day have a bust in Canton but was hardly in the prime of his career last year, even if he did turn in another world-class season. Unlike Elliott and Martin, Lamb is, in fact, in the prime of things. Shoot, he may not have even reached that yet. He plays one of the most important positions of the game on top of that and he is coming off of literally the most statistically successful season that a wide receiver has ever had in team history.

Based on all that, it is hard to believe that Lamb will report to training camp without a new deal, but what do you all think?