CeeDee Lamb Camp Update — August 16: The Touchdown Rebound Is Already on Tape

CeeDee Lamb caught two red-zone touchdowns from Dak Prescott in a single joint practice against the Rams on August 10. For a player whose entire offseason story is a touchdown drought, that is the most encouraging sentence anyone in Dallas could have written this week. Patrik Walker and Tommy Yarrish had it in the team's Practice Points coverage: Prescott threw four red-zone scores that day, and half of them went to Lamb.

The June read on Lamb was simple. Nine targets a game is the stickiest thing in football, and he has held that workload for years. What collapsed last season was the scoring: three touchdowns on well over a hundred targets, a starvation rate that history says does not persist for a player commanding a quarter of his team's targets and a third of its air yards. We said the volume was the signal and the empty end zone was the noise, with one honest complication: George Pickens, playing out his one-year deal, is a real second mouth in the red zone.

This week's evidence lines up with the rebound case. Lamb, who had excused absences back in the spring, has been present and healthy in camp, with no injury reporting on him in this window. And the red-zone work is not theoretical anymore. When the first-team offense practiced situational football against another team's defense, Prescott went to Lamb twice for scores. Pickens caught none of the four that day, for what one practice is worth, which is not much, but the direction is right. Lamb also spent part of his week talking up Ryan Flournoy, telling Mary Rominger at KSAT back on August 3 that the third receiver could reach a thousand yards. Confident alphas share praise. They rarely share red-zone targets.

Does the June read hold? CONFIRMED. The target role is intact, the health is clean, and the first live-fire red-zone evidence of August went his way.

Two things to check next week: whether Lamb plays at all in the second preseason game, and how the red-zone pecking order looks when Pickens and Lamb are on the field together in team periods. We'll check next Sunday.

_Data via nflverse._