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 LB Myles Jack (#8), LB Reggie Ragland (#18), DT Jarran Reed (#23), DT A’Shawn Robinson (#24), and DT Andrew Billings (#27). Smith (#49) wasn’t even among the top five options at that point, at least according the Consensus Big Board. The Weighted Career Approximate Value is highlighted for each player at the end of the table.

Could the Cowboys have done much better than Smith? Replacing Smith with Jack would likely have been a wash, and going to the next best linebacker would have given them Reggie Ragland, who ended up playing even fewer games in the NFL than Smith.

Chidobe Awuzie was a solid pickup for the Cowboys. He ended up starting 42 games over four years for the Cowboys before moving on to the Bengals in free agency.

Awuzie was the top-ranked player left on the consensus big board, ranking 41st overall, so it’s hard to argue with the pick.

And we will always have this to remind us of the Awuzie pick:

Like Chidobe Awuzie, Connor Williams didn’t get a second contract in Dallas, but he did play in 60 of 68 possible games during his four years with the Cowboys, with 57 of those being starts. Impressively, he recovered from a torn ACL suffered on Thanksgiving Day 2019 in time to start all 16 games of the 2020 season.

And he wasn’t far off from being the consensus BPA: At pick No. 50 there were only three players left on the consensus draft board that were ranked higher than Williams.

Consensus BPA would have been RB Derrius Guice, and that would have been a whole other can of worms for the Cowboys. Guice sat out his rookie year with an ACL, started one game in 2019 in which he tore his meniscus and was then released the following offseason after charges of domestic violence surfaced.

But while Guice was technically the BPA, Williams and the three players above him were bunched so tightly on the big board (29, 31, 32, 33), any one of them could have been the BPA. No reason to fault the Cowboys for this pick.

Every team drafts the occasional bust in the second round, but this is one bust that many saw coming immediately, and one the Cowboys could have possibly avoided if they had given the consensus board a bit more weight in their evaluation process and had not been so fixated on drafting a 3-technique for Rod Marinelli.

Trysten Hill was ranked 106th on the consensus big board, he was clearly a big reach at 58, and he was almost certainly not the BPA on the Cowboys’ draft board either.

When the Cowboys go chasing a need, they get in trouble. We saw that with Taco Charlton, we see it with Mazi Smith, we’re seeing it here with Trysten Hill and we’ll see it further down this post as well.

To add insult to injury, the Cowboys missed out on a potentially franchise-altering pick in D.K. Metcalf, who would have been the BPA, was picked six spots later by Seattle and has two Pro Bowls to his name. But that’s what you can get when you go chasing a specific position in the draft.

Even if speculation is now bubbling up that Diggs might not see out his contract in Dallas, there is no doubt that this was a very good pick by the Cowboys.

And again, like with Connor Williams above, the best players available here are ranked so tightly that the ranking may be a distinction without a difference.

With the Kelvin Joseph pick, it looks like the Cowboys again reached for a position of need and paid the price accordingly: Joseph started just three games for the Cowboys and was shipped off to Miami after two seasons.

In hindsight, almost anybody would have been a better pick, but even at the time of the draft, there were other players ranked quite a bit higher on the consensus board that would have been better picks.

The jury is still out on Sam Williams, but it’s not looking good so far. A role player with no starts in his first two years, he sat out last season with an ACL and is now entering the final year of his rookie contract with little to show so far.

Again, this is a reach pick by the Cowboys, at least according the consensus big board. Would the consensus board have given the Cowboys better options? You betcha, even if three years may be too short a period to make definitive statements about draft picks.

A year later, the Cowboys again go down what is becoming an all too familiar rabbit hole with Luke Schoonmaker, drafting a player way higher than where the consensus board had him ranked.

Many Cowboys fans made a big stink at the time when the Cowboys passed on O’Cyrus Torrence, and they’ve been proven right in hindsight. But outside of Torrence the pickings at consensus BPA would have been slim for the Cowboys anyway.

It’s too early to make any type of statement about last year’s draft class, but at least the Cowboys didn’t go down that familiar rabbit hole again.

The consensus board suggests he was the fifth-best player available, and the rankings are again so tight (between #37 and #47) that you could probably make a case for any of the five players. Time will tell if the Cowboys made the right choice.

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Would the Cowboys have had better round two results had they followed the Consensus Big Board? Here’s what the Cowboys actual picks and the consensus BPA picks add up to.

The Cowboys lose out in this head-to-head comparison against the consensus big board by a large margin. The recent misses add up to quite a bit of missing production on the roster.

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One thing that clearly stands out in this analysis is that of the nine second-round picks we looked at, five were picked when the consensus big board had at least five other players ranked higher than the player the Cowboys went on to pick (Jaylon Smith, Trysten Hill, Kelvin Joseph, Sam Williams, Luke Schoonmaker).

This is a clear pattern where the Cowboys either reach for need or think they have a secret scouting sauce that makes them grade a player way higher than the consensus does. And it’s important to understand that that secret sauce has worked out for them in the past, in fact, it is part of the myth-building around the entire franchise.

The Cowboys took a 10th round flyer on Roger Staubach, they drafted Larry Allen in the second round out of a Division II school, had a first-round grade on Jason Witten and snagged him in the third round, scored Tony Romo as a UDFA, and more recently went against the consensus with the Travis Frederick pick in 2013.

The majority of post-draft comments called the Frederick pick a reach, as virtually nobody had expected Frederick to be a first-round pick, but Frederick went on to five Pro Bowls anyway.

• Scouts Inc., the guys providing the prospect rankings for ESPN, had Frederick at No. 70.
• Mel Kiper had Frederick at No. 87 on his draft board.
• On Mike Mayock’s list of the top 100 prospects in the draft, Frederick checked in at No. 92.
• Matt Miller of Bleacher Report had Fredrick as the last player on his 100-player strong big board.

A day after the draft, ESPN Dallas reported that Travis Frederick was the No. 22 player on the Cowboys board, a claim that was met with much ridicule and incredulity at the time. It wasn’t until the Cowboys’ 2013 draft board was inadvertently leaked almost a month later (and transcribed by my good friend rabblerousr) that the Cowboys’ claim was proven right: Travis Frederick was the 22nd-ranked player on a Cowboys draft board that had 19 players with a first-round grade.

As humans, we are psychologically predisposed to confuse luck with skill. If we get a favorable outcome due to luck, we tend to ascribe that to a particular skill we think we have.

Happens all the time, everywhere.

You sink a three-pointer from mid-court, you sink a hole-in-one on the mini-golf course, you’ll crumbled-up piece of paper actually hits the wastepaperbasket in the office, you pick your franchise QB in the fourth round etc., you’ll beat your chest and tell everyone how good, how skillful you are. You will not put it down to pure luck, yet at the very next try, you won’t be able to repeat it. Ironically, you’ll put the failed attempt down to bad luck and not to a lack of skill on your part.

The same applies to the NFL draft and NFL teams. The Cowboys picked Travis Frederick and had success against all odds, but with the very next pick they took Gavin Escobar, an unheralded tight end who never lived up to his second-round pedigree.

If you drafted Peyton Manning instead of Ryan Leaf, or Patrick Mahomes over all other QBs in the 2017 draft, you might believe that you actually have some specific skill that enabled you to do that, instead of just having gotten lucky.

Hey, if I had drafted DeMarcus Ware over Shawne Merriman, or Micah Parsons over any other player in the 2021 draft, I’d be feeling pretty full of myself right now too. And every NFL franchise has these examples that makes them feel like they have some specific edge over their competitors – when in fact they just got lucky.

Acknowledging that you are not superior to your competitors (almost impossible for the 32 billionaire narcissistic owners and their staff) is the only way that you’ll see the talent acquisition process for what it is: a process where you can get lucky occasionally, but will increase your chances of success in the long term if you avoid taking unnecessary risks.

The Cowboys like taking these types of unnecessary risks, and over the last nine years it hasn’t worked out for them. But there is one piece of good news.

After the 2025 draft, Todd Archer of ESPN reported that “the Cowboys took the highest-rated players on their board at the time in guard Tyler Booker, defensive end Donovan Ezeiruaku and cornerback Shavon Revel Jr.”

So there’s that. At least they stayed true to their own board this time, even if Booker may have been a bit of a reach (#28 on the consensus board), but the Ezeiruaku pick (#29) and the Revel pick (#42) line up nicely with the consensus board.