In the autumn of the 2020 NFL season, sports analyst Colin Cowherd looked at two franchises moving in opposite directions and saw a single transaction that might restore order to both. The Green Bay Packers, gifted with an elite quarterback in the final chapters of his prime, lacked the surrounding talent to make those years count. The Dallas Cowboys, rich in skill-position players but poor in wins and defensive depth, had arrived at a crossroads between denial and reinvention. Cowherd's proposal — trade Amari Cooper from Dallas to Green Bay — was less a football argument than a meditation on
Cowherd Pitches Amari Cooper Trade to Packers as Win-Win for Both Teams
Get Aaron stars now. You can't just sit and wait.
Mark
So Cowherd is saying the Packers should trade for Cooper. What's the actual logic here?
Mimi
He's looking at two teams with opposite problems. Green Bay has Aaron Rodgers playing at an elite level but not enough weapons around him. Dallas has draft picks they could use but receivers they don't need. It's a swap of what each team lacks for what the other has too much of.
Luke
But wait—do we know the Packers actually wanted to trade for Cooper? Or that Dallas was open to moving him? This is Cowherd's idea, not reporting on actual negotiations.
Mimi
That's fair. It's a proposal, not a done deal. But the underlying observation is solid: Dallas was 2-5 and needed to rebuild, and Green Bay had Rodgers in his prime without enough help.
Mark
Why would Dallas agree to this? They just drafted CeeDee Lamb.
Mimi
Because they were losing. The preseason hype about being Super Bowl contenders had evaporated. If you're 2-5 and your defense is broken, holding onto a veteran receiver doesn't fix your problems. You need draft picks to rebuild the defense.
Luke
The question is whether Dallas actually believed they needed to rebuild at that point, or whether they thought they could still compete. That's a front office decision, not something Cowherd can force.
Mark
Did this trade ever happen?
Mimi
No. Cooper stayed in Dallas. But the idea was that if both teams had been honest about their situations, it would have made sense.
Luke
Right. It's a clean hypothetical, but it depends on both teams seeing their own situation clearly and being willing to act on it.
Der Puls
- Aaron Rodgers was playing at an elite level in 2020, yet the Packers had failed to surround him with proven weapons, leaving a championship window quietly narrowing.
- Dallas had collapsed to 2-5 despite preseason Super Bowl expectations, exposing a roster imbalance that no amount of optimism could paper over.
- Cowherd drew a sharp lesson from Tampa Bay's model — Brady was given Antonio Brown rather than a development project — and demanded Green Bay apply the same urgency.
- The trade's logic was clean: Dallas surrenders a receiver it cannot build around and gains draft capital for a defensive rebuild; Green Bay surrenders picks it doesn't need and gains an elite target immediately.
- The entire proposal rested on whether Jerry Jones would accept the harder truth — that Dallas needed to rebuild rather than compete — a question that remained stubbornly unanswered.
In the autumn of the 2020 NFL season, sports analyst Colin Cowherd looked at two franchises moving in opposite directions and saw a single transaction that might restore order to both. The Green Bay Packers, gifted with an elite quarterback in the final chapters of his prime, lacked the surrounding talent to make those years count. The Dallas Cowboys, rich in skill-position players but poor in wins and defensive depth, had arrived at a crossroads between denial and reinvention. Cowherd's proposal — trade Amari Cooper from Dallas to Green Bay — was less a football argument than a meditation on urgency: that windows close, that talent misallocated is talent wasted, and that clarity about one's situation is the rarest commodity in professional sports.
Colin Cowherd arrived at a trade proposal that felt less like speculation and more like diagnosis. The Green Bay Packers, sitting at 5-2 and leading the NFC North under Matt LaFleur, had Aaron Rodgers playing at a level that silenced his doubters — yet the roster around him remained incomplete. Cowherd's concern was simple: Rodgers had perhaps two or three championship-caliber years remaining, and surrounding him with developmental players was a quiet form of waste.
Dallas presented the mirror image. The Cowboys had entered 2020 as Super Bowl hopefuls — Mike McCarthy was in, CeeDee Lamb and Trevon Diggs had been drafted, and Dak Prescott was ascending. By late October, they sat at 2-5, a franchise in freefall that needed picks and defensive investment far more than another pass-catcher.
Cowherd's solution was to let each team's actual need drive the exchange. Green Bay would send draft capital — assets it had little use for in a win-now window — to Dallas in return for Amari Cooper, a proven veteran who could step immediately into Rodgers' offense. Dallas would bank those picks for a 2021 defensive rebuild. The Tampa Bay comparison was pointed: the Buccaneers had not asked Tom Brady to wait while talent developed around him; they had gone out and acquired Antonio Brown.
"Get Aaron stars now," Cowherd said plainly. The proposal's elegance was in its symmetry — two problems, one transaction. Whether Jerry Jones would accept the harder truth that Dallas needed to rebuild rather than compete remained the only real obstacle to a deal that, on paper, made sense for everyone.
Colin Cowherd had a trade proposal on his mind heading into the final stretch of the 2020 NFL season: send Amari Cooper from Dallas to Green Bay, and watch two struggling franchises suddenly make sense of themselves.
The setup was stark. The Packers, under second-year head coach Matt LaFleur, had defied preseason skepticism and climbed to 5-2, leading the NFC North. Aaron Rodgers, written off by some as aging, was playing at an elite level. But the roster around him felt incomplete—the team had not addressed crucial needs in the offseason, and Cowherd saw a clear mismatch: Rodgers had maybe two or three championship-caliber years left, and wasting them on development projects made no sense.
Meanwhile, Dallas was in freefall. The Cowboys sat at 2-5 in the NFC East, a stunning collapse from the preseason narrative that had painted them as Super Bowl contenders. Mike McCarthy's arrival as head coach had been supposed to usher in a new era. The additions of rookie receiver CeeDee Lamb and cornerback Trevon Diggs, combined with Dak Prescott's emergence, had fueled optimism. None of it had materialized. The Cowboys needed to rebuild, and they needed draft capital to do it.
Cowherd's argument was straightforward: Dallas did not need another receiver. They needed picks. Green Bay did not need picks. They needed weapons—right now, not in three years. Cooper, an established veteran receiver, could step into the Packers' system and give Rodgers exactly what he lacked: a proven target in his prime years. The comparison Cowherd drew was to Tampa Bay, which had not waited to develop talent around Tom Brady; it had gone out and acquired Antonio Brown to win immediately.
"You can't just sit, wait and develop people," Cowherd said on his show. "Get Aaron stars now." The logic was clean: one team trades away a receiver it cannot afford to keep and gets picks to rebuild. The other team trades picks it does not need for a receiver it desperately wants. Both teams address their actual problems.
Whether Jerry Jones, the Cowboys owner, would actually pursue such a deal remained an open question. The proposal hinged on Dallas committing to a genuine rebuild rather than trying to patch the roster and compete in the short term. But on paper, the math worked. Cooper could transition smoothly into Green Bay's offense. Rodgers would have another elite weapon. Dallas would have ammunition for the 2021 offseason, when the team's defensive needs were most urgent. It was the kind of trade that solved two problems at once—if both teams were willing to see their situations clearly.
Bemerkenswerte Zitate
Dallas needs picks, they don't need wide receivers. Green Bay doesn't need picks. You got two more, three more elite years with Aaron Rodgers, you need weapons for Aaron.— Colin Cowherd
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