Am I missing something on him?
He's had fantasy success everywhere he's been.
He gets a significant upgrade at QB and in terms of offense as a whole.
Defenses are going to focus on Lamb. Cooks should be a solid fantasy asset for at least 1 more season.
My concern is he's higher profile Gabe Davis. Where he just doesn't see the volume to pay off in weeks he doesn't hit big plays.
Cooks has never had to share with a target monster like Lamb in his career. the highest targeted player Cooks has shared with was Robert Woods in 2018 at 130 targets. Lamb saw 156 last year. Defenses have a really hard time focusing on Lamb as he's so often in motion or in the slot, he ended up covered by a LB/S more than anyone else in the NFL. I sort of think its more likely Cooks is used more as a clear out WR who hits occasional big plays.
I think he's a worthy 7th/8th round guy as a WR4, but he likely needs an injury to Lamb or Gallup to have a great return on investment. There is a shot that Lamb takes on some of Schultz routes as a possession guy, which could allow Cooks to maybe see more than I am expecting, but I'd feel a lot more comfortable with him if Kellen Moore hadn't left.
Cooks has had six 1,000-yard seasons playing on 4 different teams. In those seasons, he averaged 121 targets. In 2021, the Cowboys had 647 passing attempts. Sure, Lamb had 156 targets last year, but with Dak hurt for a big chunk of the season, the Cowboys had 102 fewer passing attempts in 2022. With Schultz, Brown, Hilton, and Zeke gone, there are another 200 targets that aren't there anymore. Essentially, if Prescott is healthy, there are 300 targets available to Cooks. The point being, they have plenty of targets available to give to Cooks without disrupting things much at all. Even if we bump up the targets to Lamb and Gallup, there are still plenty of targets available for Cooks.
Dallas is going to have a much slower and less pass aggressive offense with Kellen Moore gone in my opinion. I think the pass attempts will be a lot closer to what they were last season than in 2021. Dallas was the #1 offense in the NFL in 2021, personally, I feel like using 2021 as an expectation is giving them too much credit. The OC is worse, the OL is worse, and I'd argue the weapons are worse too. I'm certainly not treating Prescott like a top-6 QB which he was in 2021.
On top of all that, I think this is the worst situation Cooks has ever been in, with a clear cut #1 ahead of him, in what I don't think will be an elite passing game. I've got Cooks as WR43, so he probably has no chance of ending up on any team of mine, and I say that as a guy who has typically been higher than average on Cooks throughout his career. I think 120 targets is probably an absolute ceiling for Cooks. No Cowboy other than Lamb has topped 104 in the last 2 seasons. I think 100 is a fair over/under.
Also of note, the Cowboys defense has gone from 28th to 7th to 5th the last 3 years, and could be even better this year, as they added Gilmore, and Parsons and Diggs are likely still on the way up. I think the stat McCarthy cared most about (wrongly in my opinion) was Dak leading the league in INT's, despite missing 5 games. That's why Moore was fired (again wrongfully in my opinion, I think that was more bad luck variance for Dak) replacing Moore with Brian Schottenheimer certainly leads me to think the passing volume is coming down a bit, and I think the hurts all the ancillary guys, but probably has little effect on Lamb, because he's the clearcut #1. If anything, my concern is that I might have Lamb too high at WR6, I could see Lamb being more of a low-end WR1.