Cowboys Get Unbelievable News on Injured Pro Bowlers for Week 7: Report

Amari Cooper

Getty Amari Cooper

How’s this for a turn of events? Instead of facing the rival Philadelphia Eagles with a halfway-decimated offense, there’s reason to believe the Dallas Cowboys will be at full strength for Sunday night’s divisional tilt.

Citing multiple team sources, ESPN’s Todd Archer reported Friday that Dallas’ “injury situation has improved greatly” from earlier in the week, with offensive tackles Tyron Smith (ankle) and La’el Collins (knee), wide receivers Amari Cooper (quad) and Randall Cobb (back), and cornerback Byron Jones (hamstring) all expected to play against Philadelphia.

The aforementioned five, having practiced on a limited basis, were officially listed as questionable on the team’s final Week 7 injury report. They’ll be active “barring any setback,” according to Archer.

CB Anthony Brown, who’s nursing a hamstring injury, was ruled out.

Perhaps more so than the rest, the potential return of Smith and Collins are the biggest boons to the Cowboys’ struggling offense — especially battered quarterback Dak Prescott, who was sacked once and hit eight times in last week’s loss to the Jets.

“I looked over, saw them doing drills, as me and the other quarterbacks joked, ‘They look good enough to me.’ It was definitely very encouraging,” Prescott said Thursday.

Cam Fleming, who’s been exposed in Smith’s stead, and Brandon Knight, who’s performed relatively well for Collins, would draw the starts at LT and RT, respectively, if either couldn’t go.

Cobb’s status, coupled with hopeful news on Cooper, means WR Devin Smith likely will be a healthy scratch for the second straight week.

The Cowboys will announce their list of inactives 90 minutes prior to the 7:20 p.m. CT kickoff from Arlington.

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Cowboys Still Have No Interest in AB

The positive development with the injury report no doubt contributed to Cowboys owner Jerry Jones declaring zero intrigue in adding free-agent WR Antonio Brown to the pass-catching corps, which has seen Cooper, Cobb, Michael Gallup and Tavon Austin hurt at one point or another this year.

Always fun to speculate about, Brown-to-Big D rumors were ratcheted up Wednesday by Cowboys legend Michael Irvin, who called for a desperate measure in the face of desperate times. But again, on the second occasion in as many months, Jones flatly rejected the dot-connecting.

“I don’t want to be talking about any other player. I like our depth. I’m not speaking to Antonio. I’m not speaking to anybody. But I believe we’d go with the depth we have,” he said Friday, per The Athletic.


D-Law Warns Eagles HC Pederson to ‘Shut His A** Up’

Leave it to DeMarcus Lawrence to meet Doug Pederson’s Week 7 guarantee with extreme prejudice. Unlike many of his Cowboys teammates who took a sportsmanlike approach, the boisterous defensive end leveled Philly’s head man with a message that bordered on threatening.

“Tell him to come on. We ready,” Lawrence said Friday, via ESPN. “Can he play the game? So he might want to shut his ass up and stay on the sideline. He can’t play the game for them. The Eagles got to play them and he’s supposed to sit on the sideline and do whatever he wants to do. But he can’t play the game for them so we’ll see.”

Pederson, no stranger to headlines, grabbed center stage of the impending NFC East rivalry game. On the heels of Dallas’ horrific loss to the Jets, the Super Bowl-winning coach twisted the knife deeper, promising to send the Cowboys below .500 while grabbing hold of the division lead.

“We’re going down to Dallas and our guys are going to be ready to play,” Pederson declared on local radio, via SI.com. “And we’re going to win that football game, and when we do, we’re in first place in the NFC East.”

Realizing that his opponent doesn’t need more bulletin-board material, Pederson almost immediately backtracked, arguing in a separate radio stint that “I never used the term or the word ‘guarantee.”

“All I was doing was showing confidence in my football team because there comes a point, especially here in Philadelphia, where you lose a game or two and everybody feels like everything’s kind of caving in on the football team,” he said, via SI.com.


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Follow Zack Kelberman on Twitter: @KelbermanNFL