Entering its 12th season, the NFL career of Brandin Cooks is coming full circle.
The 31-year-old wide receiver who has played on five different teams and spent the past two years in Dallas, is returning to the team that originally drafted him.
Cooks will sign with the New Orleans Saints, who selected Cooks 20th overall in the 2014 draft coming out of Oregon State. The news was reported by NFL insiders Mike Garafolo and Tom Pelissero on Friday afternoon.
ESPN’s Adam Schefter is initially calling the deal a two-year pact worth $13 million. Spotrac pegs Cooks’s career earnings at over $116 million.
After trades sent him from New Orleans to New England and to Los Angeles and Houston, Cooks was traded- for the fifth time in his career- to the Cowboys during the 2023 offseason.
The veteran, who by then had six 1,000-yard campaigns under his belt, served as an experienced WR2 opposite CeeDee Lamb, forcing defenses to respect him as a legitimate threat in the Dallas passing attack. Cooks responded with 54 catches, 657 yards, and eight touchdowns on 81 targets, all second-best marks among Dallas wide receivers that year.
Cooks’s 2024 season took an unfortunate turn in Week 5 when an infection after a knee procedure resulted in a seven-game absence. With appearances in just 10 contests, Cooks saw career lows in targets, receptions, and receiving yards.
Heading into free agency for the first time this offseason, Cooks said he was “open to returning” the the Cowboys in 2025, but, he added, “They would have to use me right. I don’t think they fully used me to my strengths.”
Now he’ll join a Saints squad undergoing a heavy-duty rebuild with new head coach Kellen Moore, who had departed as Dallas’s offensive coordinator before Cooks arrived. New Saints QB coach Scott Tolzien and tight ends coach Chase Haslett, though, both served on the Cowboys’ staff during Cooks’s time there and will provide some level of familiarity.
That Cooks lingered on the free agent market for two weeks before this signing indicated that the Cowboys were always unlikely to bring him back. But now his absence leaves Dallas with even more of a genuine need for a secondary wideout.
All-Pro return ace KaVontae Turpin will likely only ever be an occasional receiver in certain specialty packages. And so far, no one out of the group that includes Jalen Tolbert, Jalen Brooks, Jonathan Mingo, and Ryan Flournoy (combined career stats: 44 starts, 161 receptions, 1,288 yards) looks ready to ascend to the WR2 role full-time. Parris Campbell signed with the Cowboys a week ago.
Arizona’s Tetairoa McMillan, Missouri’s Luther Burden III, Matthew Golden out of Texas, and Emeka Egbuka from Ohio State are all expected to be drafted early and could be potential targets of the Cowboys in the first or second rounds of next month’s draft.
This article originally appeared on Cowboys Wire: Free Agency: WR Brandin Cooks departs Cowboys for $13M Saints deal
