Blogging The Boys
The Cowboys have a tell when it comes to their first-round picks for a first-year head coach
Before reading, imagine the meme of Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where photos and red lines are thumb-tacked all over a board behind him. Trying to determine which way the Dallas Cowboys might be leaning this early in the first round of the draft may seem like a fool's errand; however, there is one thread we can follow that offers clues about which direction to consider.
Dallas is a draft-and-develop team. That has been their core belief regarding roster construction for almost a decade. The front office will be tasked with helping out their first-time head coach, Brian Schottenheimer, in a way they neglected to do last year for Mike McCarthy: getting him some good players to work with.
Considering the history and the core belief in building through the draft, there could be a blueprint for how the Cowboys might navigate the first round with their 12th overall pick.
The Cowboys franchise has had ten head coaches, with five hired in the last 20 years, starting with Bill Parcells in 2003. When any head coach is hired, who they select with their first pick in their tenure really paints the picture of who they want to be and is usually a player the franchise builds around in that era.
The last four coaches in Dallas have had the fortune of Jerry Jones drafting players who align with their identities as offensive or defensive coaches in the first round. While circumstances influence who gets drafted, things don’t always work out as expected. This could be a coincidence or a connection that doesn’t exist. However, the fact that this has occurred for every first-year head coach since 2003 indicates a pattern.
Here are those first-round selections by the Cowboys in the first year of a new head coach:
Bill Parcells - Terence Newman, DB
Wade Phillips - Anthony Spencer, DE
Jason Garrett - Tyron Smith, OT
Mike McCarthy - CeeDee Lamb, WR
There is a story about the 2003 draft and how Parcells argued with the scouts about who he wanted them to pick. Newman was not Parcells' guy, and he wanted to go in the direction of a defensive tackle, arguing with Jones during their pre-draft meetings. Even if Newman was not the pick, the goal was still to give Parcells, a defensive coach by nature, a player on that side of the ball to work with.
In 2020, during McCarthy’s first draft with Dallas, they desperately needed an edge rusher heading into that season, and all eyes were on LSU’s K’Lavon Chaisson. When the Cowboys were on the clock at pick No. 17, CeeDee Lamb was a blinking light staring at their faces. They decided to go with the best player available instead of drafting a player at a position of necessity.
[When McCarthy first got to Dallas, he talked about wanting to...
