Cowboys Pro Bowl WR makes honest admission about contract talks

In any sport, if there are ongoing discussions relating to money, a contract extension, or a player's future, things can quickly become tense. And with the Dallas Cowboys in the process of working out a potentially long-term contract extension with star wide receiver CeeDee Lamb, all fans can do at this point is sit back and hope it gets done sooner than later.

But for Lamb, who's coming off the best year of his career and is widely viewed as one of the NFL's rising stars, it doesn't appear that his contract talks will become a distraction anytime soon. As The Athletic's Jon Machota revealed, Lamb, who has two years left on his rookie deal, is more focused on the here and now than he is worried about his new deal.

“I’m going to be 100 percent honest, I’m not even distracted,” he said. “The money, definitely worried about it. But it’s not nothing that’s really on my mind every day that I wake up or when I come to the building. I don’t really think about how much money am I gonna make. It’s really just all about coming in and showing my worth, and then letting everything else handle itself.”

It's admirable to see Lamb view the situation this way, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes Lamb still has to show his worth. The 24-year-old enters the 2023 season primed to breakout as the next big star wide receiver in the NFL if he hasn't already made it to that level.

Lamb was named a second-team All-Pro last year and made his second consecutive Pro Bowl while hauling in 107 passes for 1,359 yards and nine touchdowns in the regular season. For good measure, Lamb also caught 14 passes for 185 yards and one touchdown over the Cowboys' two playoff games.

Regarding how Lamb's expected contract extension could look, Spotrac pegged him with a market value of $22.5 million per year, placing the Cowboys star just inside the top 10 of all wide receivers. The number makes sense, and there's virtually no world where Lamb winds up being outside of the 10 highest-paid wideouts in the league. But just how high the Cowboys will go, especially when factoring in that other young talent, such as Trevon Diggs and Micah Parsons, are in the market for contract extensions over the next two years.

Expect Lamb to be a mainstay of the Cowboys' offense for years to come, and there's very little doubt that his first NFL contract extension will be a big one and that he'll be in Dallas for the long haul.