In the press conference following the first day of the 2016 draft, Jerry Jones said Ezekiel Elliott had the highest grade of any player on their draft board. Many observers at the time assumed that Jerry was just using a tried-and-tested GM line to justify the pick. After all, doesn’t every GM use the “He was the best player on our board” line to justify a controversial draft pick? After all, since NFL teams generally don’t divulge their draft boards, it’s a hard claim to dispute or verify.

10 weeks later a Cowboys intern inadvertently leaked the Cowboys 2016 draft board by posting shots of an empty Cowboys war room that still had the big board all over the walls. And that big board showed the Cowboys did indeed have Elliott ranked at the very top of their board and that Jerry Jones wasn’t lying when he said “He was the best player on our board.”

But unlike the Cowboys, who leak draft boards left and right, we have no way of knowing what the big boards of other teams look like.

What we do have however, are consensus big boards which make it fairly easy to check how a given team did in the draft versus the consensus.

The Consensus Big Board isn’t a bad way to evaluate players either. When looking at how it projected players in the 2014 and 2015 draft, it was almost identically as efficient as the NFL.

More recently, PFFs Timo Riske showed how the consensus big board matched the actual 2021 draft quite well.

NFLMockdraftdatabase.com curates just such a consensus big board by compiling hundreds of big boards, first-round mocks, and team-based mocks into one giant big board. We’ll use their big board to figure out how the Cowboys did versus the consensus big board, and we’ll use the following parameters to do that:

• To evaluate picks, we’ll use Weighted Career Approximate Value (wAV) from Pro Football Reference.
• Color scheme is simple: wAV below 4 per year is red, wAV from 4 to 6.9 per year is yellow, wAV greater 7 per year is green.
• The Big Board data only goes back to 2016, so that’s where we’ll start our journey.
• For each Cowboys first-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 the Cowboys were never in the market for a QB with their top pick to begin with, at least not since 2016.

The Cowboys had Elliott at the very top of their board. The consensus big board had Elliott ranked 10th overall, so who should the Cowboys have drafted had they gone strictly by the consensus big board?

How to read the chart: In 2016, the top three picks were 1. Jared Goff (Consensus #1), 2. Carson Wentz (Consensus #2), and 3. Joey Bosa (Consensus #5), so they were already gone by the time to Cowboys were on the clock with the No. 4 pick (so they don’t show up in the table at all).

The five Consensus Best Players at that point were, in order, Jalen Ramsey (#3), Laremy Tunsil (#4), DeForest Buckner (#6), Ronnie Stanley (#7), and Myles Jack (#8). Elliott (#10) wasn’t even among the top five options at that point, at least according the Consensus Big Board.

As many, many, many Cowboys fans screamed at the time, Jalen Ramsey (#3 consensus rank) would have been the better pick, and Jerry Jones admitted as much recently when he said that using the No. 4 overall pick on a running back might have been a misallocation of resources.

Jerry Jones on the declining value of drafting a running back in the first round since they took Ezekiel Elliott 4th overall in 2016: "Zeke was (picked) too high for us"#DallasCowboys

— Clarence Hill Jr (@clarencehilljr) April 24, 2023

Will Jerry remember what he said two years ago when he’s on the clock in the 2025 NFL draft?

In 2016, Ramsey should have been the pick, though you can’t really fault the Cowboys for taking the top player on their board – but you’ve got to wonder about the process that landed a running back at the top of the team’s board.

I wish I could skip this one, but it is what it is. Nobody is arguing (anymore) that Charlton was a good pick, but that may not have been so clear at the time as it seems today.

At pick No. 24 there were exactly three players left on the consensus draft board that were ranked higher than Charlton, and none of them was named T.J. Watt!

Consensus BPA would have been Reuben Foster, and that would have been a bad pick too. Dalvin Cook wasn’t an option after the Elliott pick the year before, and Forrest Lamp never got over his injuries. Ryan Ramczyk might have been the best option, had the Cowboys not been so fixated on a pass rusher.

The Cowboys at the time were hot for a pass rusher, and in hindsight, T.J. Watt would have been a vastly superior choice, but he was “only” ranked 35th on the consensus big board, 15 spots below Charlton.

But the takeaway form the Taco pick is not the Charlton vs Watt debate, it’s about the dangers of chasing a specific position in the draft. Jon Machota of The Athletic summarizes:

Coming off a 13-3 season in 2016, Dallas’ biggest need was a pass rusher to complement DeMarcus Lawrence. The elite pass rushers were expected to be gone by the 28th pick in 2017.

Three edge rushers had a realistic chance of being there for the Cowboys late in the first round: Takkarist McKinley, T.J. Watt and Taco Charlton. All three were part of Dallas’ list of 30 official pre-draft visitors, a good indicator of the team’s interest.

McKinley went to Atlanta two picks before the Cowboys went on the clock. Their decision would come down to Watt or Charlton. The deciding factor was scheme fit. Charlton, at 6’6, 277 pounds, was a better match for Rod Marinell’s 4-3 defensive scheme than Watt (6’4, 252). Marinelli saw Charlton as an ideal 4-3 end. T.J. Watt was viewed as a 3-4 outside linebacker, the position he has played for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who drafted him two picks after Dallas selected Charlton.

Hard to argue against the Vander Esch pick. It’s very unfortunate that his career was cut short by injuries, but when he was on, the “Wolf Hunter” was worth every bit of the draft capital invested in him. I’m typically not a fan of drafting a non-money 5 position (QB, DE, OT, WR, CB) in the first round, but Vander Esch’s value was evident when he played, even if he lived in Sean Lee’s shadow in Dallas for a long time.

But could the Cowboys have done better by going consensus BPA? Here are the consensus BPA players that would have still been available with the 24th pick in the 2018 draft:

Ridley, Landry, Evans, and Moore all played in 2024, Vander Esch didn’t. As time goes on, and those guys keep playing, this comparison will look less favorable for Vander Esch, but that’s the reality of the NFL, where your best ability is availability.

We’re skipping 2019 (the Cowboys traded their pick for Amari Cooper) and going straight to 2020.

There’s no doubt the Cowboys hit a home run with this pick, and many Cowboys fans immediately felt that way on draft night after Lamb inexplicably dropped all the way to No. 17.

But what does the consensus board say?

Lamb was the top guy left on the consensus big board, ranking 13th overall. And the Cowboys apparently had him ranked way, way higher.

#Cowboys owner Jerry Jones says CeeDee Lamb was their 6th best player on the board.

— Jane Slater (@SlaterNFL) April 24, 2020

Importantly, the Cowboys were reportedly targeting K’Lavon Chaisson in a big way, but someone had the wherewithal in the draft room to stick to their board and draft the best player available, and that turned out to be Lamb on the Cowboys’ board, and on the consensus board.

It’s interesting that in Lamb and Justin Jefferson the Cowboys had their pick of two of the best wide receivers in the league today. They chose to go with the higher-ranked Lamb.

Justin Jefferson would have been an interesting option as well, but K’Lavon Chaisson shows you the pitfalls that lurk even on the consensus big board.

By almost every metric, Micah Parsons is the best player to emerge from the 2021 draft.

At the time of the draft, the Cowboys had him ranked as the best defensive player on the board, but oddly planned to take a corner with their top pick.

Stephen Jones tells us they had Micah Parsons as the best defensive player in the draft. Says they probably would have taken one of those corners if they were available though.

— Jeff Cavanaugh (@timeforjeffrey) July 30, 2021

Again, you’ve got to wonder about a process that leads you to prioritize two lower-ranked guys over the top guy on your board.

The consensus board at the time had Parsons ranked 13th, two spots below CB Patrick Surtain, the best defensive player on the consensus board. Had the Cowboys gone with the best available consensus pick, they’d have taken Rashawn Slater ahead of Parsons. Not a bad option, but one that pales next to Parsons.

On to the next draft.

The Tyler Smith pick was criticized quite a bit at the time, in large part because many observers felt he had been drafted too high by the Cowboys, and the consensus big board bears this out: Smith was ranked just 35th on the consensus big board.

The Cowboys, bless their draft board-leaking hearts, had Smith ranked 16th overall, and after three years it looks like their evaluation was much better than the consensus evaluation.

Here are the consensus BPA players that would have still been available with the 24th pick in the 2022 draft:

Looks like the Cowboys scored big again with this pick. Sure, it’s just three years, but the Cowboys and Smith are off to a rocket start and Smith has the fifth-highest wAV of the entire draft class.

At the end of March 2022, just a few weeks before the draft, Jerry Jones made the team’s intentions clear:

“Famous last words: We’ll get [an offensive lineman] unless Lamb or Parsons is there.”

Again, we see the Cowboys chasing a position here. They got lucky with Smith, but they could just as easily have ended up with a Taco Charlton-like disaster.

And another odd curiosity: The Cowboys didn’t even trust their own board, which had safety Lewis Cine at #13 ahead of Smith at #16 when the Cowboys were on the clock. So not only did they fixate on a specific position ahead of the draft, they even ignored their own big board to select that position – and still ended up with one of the best players in the draft class. How lucky is that?

The Cowboys went into the draft focused on a big run stuffer, and were about to find out that their luck had run out.

Could they have done better than Mazi Smith by following the consensus board?

Two years in, it’s not yet immediately clear from the numbers above that the Cowboys could have done much better. But that may change this year as players like Nolan Smith, Joey Porter, or Brian Branch develop into quality NFL starters – and Mazi Smith doesn’t.

It’s always tough doing these comparisons after just one year, and we know that Guyton had a rocky start. Here’s how he fared versus the consensus better options at #29.

It’s early days for this draft class, but in this exercise there is no clear winner. Sure, Guyton didn’t light up the league last year, but neither did the guys the consensus considered better alternatives.

---

Would the Cowboys have had better round one results had they followed the Consensus Big Board? Out of the eight picks we looked at above, Ceedee Lamb is the only player at the top of the consensus board when the Cowboys were on the clock. Here’s what the Cowboys actual picks and the consensus BPA picks add up to.

The Cowboys come out ahead in this comparison, which in principle is good news. Based on wAV, they are about 9% better than the consensus, which means they are outperforming the market in some form. But we also saw that while the results may be there, the process that produced them was dubious at times, and they also got lucky quite a bit.

For this year’s draft, the Cowboys seem to be targeting a wide receiver with their first-round pick. And if a WR is the highest-rated player on their board, so be it. But sometimes, luck is when preparation meets opportunity, and a little bit of luck never hurt anybody in the draft. Or to paraphrase Jerry Jones:

“We’ll get a wide receiver unless a Lamb or a Parsons falls to us.”