Blogging The Boys
When August rolls around, Milton should spice up exhibition football for the Cowboys.
It’s nice to have a backup quarterback. For the Dallas Cowboys, we won’t know if they fall into that category or not until we get a good glimpse of second-year player Joe Milton III. In April, the Cowboys traded a fifth-round pick to acquire Milton from the Patriots. Dallas also got a seventh-round pick in return. After being taken in the sixth round in the 2024 draft, Milton played one game for New England last year. He performed well, but the Patriots had a crowded quarterback room after using a third overall pick on Drake Maye and signing Joshua Dobbs to a two-year, $8 million deal.
Milton will get a better opportunity in Dallas as the team doesn’t have Cooper Rush or Trey Lance, both left in free agency. Currently, Will Grier is the next man in line for the job, meaning the job is Milton’s to lose.
Even though Milton was a sixth-round pick and the Patriots gave him up for next to nothing, the idea of what he’s capable of brings a little bit of excitement to the backup quarterback position. Between his mobility and his one-game performance last year, there is some intrigue. Can he be a guy who can keep the boat afloat should Dak Prescott miss some games? Is he a guy who has enough playmaking ability to allow the offense to hum if Prescott is out of action for an extended amount of time? That is something that we’ll have to wait to find out, but in the meantime, we’ll be treated to some added excitement come the preseason. How many times have we been able to say that?
Today, we’ll examine some backups in years past who, whether they turned out or not, provided us with some level of interest during the preseason. Full disclosure, I didn’t care much about the preseason during my younger years as a fan, so this only goes back about 20 years. If you have preseason stories that go back further, we’d love to hear them.
Yes, this time last year, we prepared for the Trey Lance experiment. The Cowboys used a fourth-round pick to acquire him from San Francisco, so the hope was that something would click for this young quarterback. Sadly, that was not the case. Lance didn’t look good in the preseason, and even though Prescott was lost for half the season, he didn’t get a chance to play any real snaps until the season finale. And when he did play, he looked like he did in the preseason, which was a quarterback who still wasn’t ready to play at the NFL level. Lance is gone now, but for a brief moment, he put a little curiosity in August football.
Before he was on the Amazing Race, Survivor, or creating captivating episodes of the White Lotus, Mike White was a quarterback for the Cowboys. Okay, maybe...
