Blogging The Boys
The Dallas Cowboys thought they got a gift from the Chicago Bears way back before even hiring head coach Brian Schottenheimer, when they were able to hire their former coach Matt Eberflus as defensive coordinator after the Bears relieved him of head coaching duties. As we all know at this point, that did not work out in the slightest, but that doesn’t mean a gift from the Bears wasn’t still on the way. Ben Johnson’s Bears handed the Cowboys one of their worst losses of the 2025 season all the way back in week three, but they also earned their first playoff win since 2010 on Saturday night with an epic come-from-behind victory against their arch rival Green Bay Packers.
By eliminating the Packers from the playoffs with a second straight thrilling home win against them, the Bears result, plus the result of the earlier game from Saturday featuring the Rams winning at the Panthers, solidified where the Cowboys will draft with both of their first round picks in 2026. Their own pick being at 12th overall has been known for a little while now, but the other pick was of course dependent on what the Packers – sans Micah Parsons, but with Trevon Diggs – would do in the playoffs. In the playoffs for the third straight year as the expanded seventh seed, for the second year in a row the Packers could not replicate what they did as the first ever seven seed in 2023 when they dismantled the Cowboys at AT&T Stadium, instead losing in the Wild Card round again.
This means a pick that could have gone as low 32nd overall and no higher than 25th overall if the Packers continued to advance is now a much more juicy 20th overall pick for the Cowboys to use to their advantage. The Dallas defense needs all of the help it can get, and while there’s still months to decide what the best way to help it is, right now the excitement is in the range of opportunities having two top 20 picks presents.
The Cowboys have only picked twice in the top 20 picks of the first round three times in their franchise history, but as we’re about to look at, it’s yielded some pretty incredible results each time, especially for the defense. The Cowboys also picked twice within the first 20 selections in 1965, but 19th overall pick Malcolm Walker, a center from Rice, was still a second-round pick. The year prior in 1964, the same thing happened with the 17th overall pick being in the second round, but Dallas turned that pick into Hall of Famer Mel Renfro. This happened one other time in 1961, the year after the team was founded, when after starting the draft with Mr. Cowboy Bob Lilly 13th overall, they picked again at 16th in the second round and drafted Texas Tech linebacker E.J. Holub.
For the sake of modern context though, we are only going to focus on 1975,...
