Blogging The Boys
All of the mock draft action these days has the Cowboys taking a wide receiver.
On the premise that the predictive value of many mock drafts is greater than that of a single mock, we regularly a take a survey of a large number of mock drafts here on Blogging The Boys.
At the end of January, we published our first mock draft database of the season. At the time, 22 of the 25 mocks (88%) we looked at were projecting the Cowboys to take either RB Ashton Jeanty (13 mocks) or WR Luther Burden (9). I can already tell you that neither of those players shows up in today’s mock draft round up. Not once.
In mid March, right after after the first wave of free agency, we looked at 40 of the latest mock drafts and found that the mock draft community had pivoted quite significantly over the previous six weeks: WR & RB remained the most popular positions but at 48% of the mocks, they were a far cry from the 88% we saw in our January mock draft summary. In total, 18 different players were mocked to the Cowboys in the 40 mocks, so there was clearly no consensus on what the Cowboys would do in the draft at the time.
Today, we’ve summarized 35 of the latest mock drafts published on or after Monday this week (see table at the bottom of this post), and we see yet another seismic shift in the mock draft landscape. 30 of the 35 mocks (86%) published since Monday have the Cowboys picking a wide receiver, with WRs Tetairoa McMillan and Matthew Golden getting 15 votes each. OL Tyler Booker has 3 votes, CB Shavon Revel and RB Omarion Hampton get one vote each.
Interestingly, some of the bigger names in the mock draft business (Daniel Jeremiah, Mel Kiper, Todd McShay, Dane Brugler, Lance Zierlein) have recently thrown their name behind Matthew Golden, and Golden’s rise through the mocks to the No. 12 spot is something we haven’t often seen before.
In January, not a single mock had the Cowboys picking Golden, not one. In March, that number increased slightly, with 5 of the 40 mocks sending Golden to the Cowboys at #12, two more mocks had him going even higher. At the same time, seven mocks had him dropping out of the first round all together. And that was just four weeks ago!
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly who started the Golden-to-Dallas train, but from my records it looks like Daniel Jeremiah of NFL.com was the first “big name” to mock Golden to Dallas on March 18th, and Golden’s stock has risen sharply since.
But how much stock can we put into what a bunch of mock drafters dream up? Some NFL teams do find value in checking out mock drafts.
According to The Athletic, it may be way more than you probably think:
In polling front office members across the league, The Athletic found that 15...
