Blogging The Boys
2025 Dallas Cowboys first-round pick Tyler Booker got 14 starts in his rookie season. Second-round pick Donovan Ezeiruaku got nine starts as he got acclimated to the NFL. Third-round pick Shavon Revel spent the first half of the season in the trainer’s room before notching five starts in the last seven games. Fifth-round pick Jaydon Blue notched just 78 snaps on offense over five games and needed “a lot of coaching” in his first season. Fellow running back Phil Mafah only saw limited action in the season finale, and two draft picks never made the 53-man roster.
Doesn’t sound like an auspicious start for the 2025 rookie class, does it?
Yet thanks in part to a strong second half of the season, some help form UDFAs, and fifth-round LB Shemar James getting six starts, the 2025 rookie class accumulated 2,956 snaps, which is 11.7% of the total amount of snaps the Cowboys played on offense and defense last year. That may not sound like much at first glance, but those 11.7% are the equivalent of 2.6 starters, which is slightly above the Cowboys’ multi-year average.
A solid but certainly not record-breaking rookie class performance, but not many people expected a record-breaking contribution to begin with.
At the end of April last year, just a few days after the draft, I posted an article here on Blogging The Boys titled “Why Cowboys’ 2025 rookie class may deliver up to four starters.” At the time, I wondered if the 2025 draft class might yield four eventual starters, even if the 2025 class might not have had the star power of some successful previous draft classes. I also took a stab at projecting the snap counts for the nine players the Cowboys had just drafted. Here’s how that projection compares with the actual snap count:
body .sbnu-legacy-content-table td, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table th, body .sbnu-legacy-content-table { border: 1px solid #000 !important; border-collapse: collapse !important; } 2025 Rookie Class Snap CountRoundNamePOSProjected Snaps****Actual snaps1Tyler BookerOG1,1441,0022Donovan EzeiruakuDE2236043Shavon RevelCB5983345Jaydon BlueRB204785Shemar JamesLB325446Ajani CorneliusOL39**—7Jay ToiaDT233907Phil MafahRB0107Tommy AkingbesoteDT9—Total Draft class snaps2,6732,662Draft class in % of total**10.7%**10.6%**Waiver pickupTrikwese BridgesCB—248UDFAAlijah ClarkS—40UDFAZion ChlidressCB—6****Total Rookie rookie class **2,956 (11.7%)**It’s widely held that a good draft class yields two solid starters. Two starters may not be a great draft, but it is certainly a solid draft. However, those two starters are not necessarily expected to be starters in their first season.
It’s still early, and it’s still hard to estimate how many future starters could emerge out of last year’s rookie class. Tyler Booker and Donovan Ezeiruaku certainly look to figure prominently on next season’s team, and Shavon Revel could benefit from a new DC and a healthy offseason. Beyond those three, every emerging player would just be a bonus.
Three years (and sometimes even more) is the standard usually used to fully evaluate a rookie class. Which is why we’re now going to look at how the snap percentages of each season’s rookie class have progressed over the years. We’ll look at the data since 2013...
