What Cowboys’ recent 2nd-round picks would have looked like had Dallas used a consensus big board

Here is who the Cowboys would have drafted in the second round of the last 9 drafts if they had gone by the consensus big board.

Shortly before the 2025 NFL Draft, we published an article here on BTB looking at what the Cowboys’ recent first-round picks would have looked like had Dallas used a consensus big board.

We found that with their first-round picks, the Cowboys beat a head-to-head comparison against the consensus big board. But we also saw that while the results looked good for the Cowboys, the process that produced those results was dubious at times, and they also got lucky quite a bit.

Today, we’ll repeat that April exercise, but we’ll do it for the Cowboys second-round picks. We’ll look at all picks since 2016 and figure out who the Cowboys should have picked if they had followed a consensus big board and how those picks compare against their actual picks, and we’ll use the following parameters to do that:

• We’ll use NFLMockdraftdatabase.com for the consensus big board. Their data only goes back to 2016, so that’s where we’ll start our journey.
• To evaluate picks, we’ll use Weighted Career Approximate Value (wAV) from Pro Football Reference.
• For each Cowboys second-round pick, we’ll look at the top five players still available at the time the Cowboys were on the clock that would have been the best player available (BPA) according to the consensus big board.
• QBs are excluded from the five BPAs. QB wAV can sometimes skew the comparison, and we remain eternally thankful that their bid to trade up for Paxton Lynch in 2016 failed.

One popular question Cowboys fans like to speculate about is who the Cowboys would have drafted had they not drafted Jaylon Smith in 2016. We know from the leaked the Cowboys 2016 draft board that the Cowboys had Smith ranked as the No. 5 player on their board, and we also know that the No. 6 player on their board was fellow linebacker Myles Jack. Jack was also available when the Cowboys were on the clock with the 34th pick, and it stands to reason the Cowboys would have picked Jack if Smith had not been available. But for many Cowboys fans, that may not be a terribly exciting answer to the original question, so does the consensus big board give us a better option than Myles Jack?

Not really. The consensus big board, which had Jaylon Smith ranked just 49th overall, had Myles Jack ranked eighth overall, so even if the Cowboys had deferred to the consensus board, Jack would still have been the most likely pick for the Cowboys.

The table below summarizes the top five players still available at the time the Cowboys were on the clock with the 34th pick that would have been the best player available (BPA) according to the consensus big board.

How to read the table: In 2016, the five consensus best players for the Cowboys’ second-round pick were...