Diante Lee

a great move for him to show that he's okay with playing ball this way.

I'm with you.

If I'm his team, I come in and say, hey, I want it in writing just like you did with Dak Prescott.

You're not going to tag us again after this year.

We're going to hit the open market.

And if you do that, we'll give you the first right of refusal basically on any contract.

Even if I go out and scour the market, whatever deal I go get from whatever team might be interested, we're going to bring it back to you and ask if you can match it.

Or can you beat it by a dollar?

Can you beat it with another year?

Whatever the case may be.

But I think that just playing this out, take 2026 as what it is, and then go hit the open market and see what's out there is probably a wiser decision for Pickens.

Because what's most likely for a guy like him is that you're going to be traded...

For pennies in terms of draft compensation, for a team that's going to bring him in and say, we are not married to you, we're not tied to you, and if you do anything we don't like, we're going to go ahead and let you hit the open market.

And then best of luck to you trying to rehab your reputation, having burned it both in Pittsburgh with Mike Tomlin, and then wherever he will be landing next.

I think that being in Dallas and trying to go be as productive as possible in a situation that I think is very friendly to George Pickens is probably the best move, I think, for the long term of his career.

I agree.

And I think it comes back to a lot of conversations that we've had on the show all year, right, is that the teams who have had the advantage in the trenches ultimately have been the ones that have moved along in this process.

New England was an outlier to that.

They had kind of been skating by in the playoffs with some poor offensive performances, our offensive line really struggling and them having turnover issues.

And they happened to run into the one team that was not going to give the ball right back to them.