Blogging The Boys
Who would the Cowboys have drafted over the last decade if they listened to Mel Kiper and Daniel Jeremiah? We have the answers.
ESPN’s Mel Kiper and NFL.com’s Daniel Jeremiah are two of the biggest names in the mock draft business and have been for years. So today we ask ourselves what would have happened if the Cowboys had followed the pair’s mock draft suggestions in the first round of the last 10 drafts, and how that compares to what the Cowboys actually did - something we’ve done intermittently here on Blogging The Boys over the last decade or so, albeit Daniel Jeremiah now takes the place of Todd McShay, who’s out of the mock draft business for now.
In the mock draft world, there’s only one mock that ultimately counts: the final mock draft published before the actual draft. That doesn’t stop mock drafters from creating countless mocks before that final one, but most of those are entertainment for a long offseason. Which is why today we’ll only look at Kiper’s and Jeremiah’s final mock drafts from 2015 through 2024.
Before we check out the two draft experts, here is a summary of the Cowboys’ first-round picks in the last 10 drafts, along with some metrics we’ll use to evaluate the picks.
Why the cutoff at 10 years? Simply because it’s a nice round number. At 11 years, we’d have included Zack Martin, which would have made the Cowboys look a lot better. At 12 years, Travis Frederick would have been a strong add to the list, at 13 we’d have included Morris Claiborne, not a great look for the Cowboys. 14 years? Tyron Smith, plus-good. 15 years? Dez Bryant, double-plus-good.
And that’s a bit of an issue for the Cowboys’ draft record. That five-year stretch between 2010 and 2014 outperforms the next 10 years in every single metric on the table above: 11 All-Pro seasons, 25 Pro Bowl seasons, 40 starter seasons, 602 games started, and a strong Weighted Career Approximate Value (wAV) of 340.
Like many things in the Cowboys universe, the Cowboys’ draft record lives mostly on past glories, and I shudder to think what that record would look like had the team not lucked into Micah Parsons and CeeDee Lamb, or had gotten its hands on Paxton Lynch in 2016. Dallas is not the Pro Bowl factory it once was.
Here’s how the Cowboys’ draft record over the last 10 years compares to the rest of the league in terms of wAV.
Overall, the table establishes that the Cowboys have been a middling drafting team over the last 10 years, ranking close to average with their first-round picks. Of course, the numbers would be better without Taco Charlton, but every team whiffs on a first-rounder at some point. And yes, had they not traded away their 2019 first-rounder, they’d probably also look better. But it is what it is.
With that, let’s turn to Kiper and Jeremiah to see how their picks for the Cowboys...
