Occasionally, NFL draft twitter can be wonderful. Tuesday was one of those days.
Using a blurry, grainy and mostly illegible image posted to Twitter by WFAA sports host Mike Leslie, a crowd of fans, reporters and websites related to the Dallas Cowboys spent hours Tuesday afternoon posting the team’s draft on social media decrypt media. The end result was a remarkably entertaining thread which by all accounts seems to have deciphered a large portion of the top end of the Dallas Draft Board (which you can see at the end of this story).
If you keep count, this is at least the fourth (!) time the Dallas draft board has been exposed by photos or videos leaking online. We’ll come back to that in a moment. But that latest accidental revelation came straight from team owner Jerry Jones, who basically asked about it as he held a copy of the team’s player rankings in front of cameras.
The incident happened after day one of the draft while speaking to the media and justifying the selection of Tulsa offensive lineman Tyler Smith 24th overall. Robert had apparently rated Smith higher than two guards who had preceded him in the first round. A pure Jones moment unfolded as the franchise owner held up a copy of the team’s draft to the media while seated alongside his son Stephen, head coach Mike McCarthy and vice president of player staff Will McClay.
“Can you see that?” said a grinning Jones holding up the paper.
“Don’t show them that,” retorted Cowboys general manager Stephen Jones, chuckling and staring at McClay, who laughed and rocked in his seat.
“I’m dead serious,” Jerry continued.
“Put the sheet down,” Stephen urged.
As far as the designs go, especially when there were six laps left, it was a surreal moment. It was also a challenge for fans and reporters that you knew would be accepted. As in previous years – we’ll get to that in a moment – someone had a photo. This time it was Lesliewho took a screenshot of the leaf from the WFAA footage and then posted it to Twitter for sniffer dogs to get to work.
The story goes on
If this sounds familiar to you, it should. A version of this has happened to Dallas at least three other times. In 2010, the team’s internal media arm mistakenly included a video clip of Jerry Jones standing before the team’s board on the final day of drafting. A handful of fans snapped photos of the leak before it was removed, and they eventually made their way to Blogging The Boys, an in-depth Cowboys website that unearthed impressively extensive chunks of Dallas player ratings across all seven rounds.
The site pulled off similarly impressive feats in 2013 and 2016, again with blurry images making their way online. In 2013, snaps provided by the team showed Jerry (note this topic) standing before his club’s drafting committee. In 2016, a team member snapped a photo of the board and briefly posted it online more than two months after the selection was complete, apparently taken as the franchise began its transition from the Valley Ranch facility in Dallas to The Star in Frisco.
In most of these cases, the pictures aren’t a big deal. If anything, they serve as a fascinating historical record of how Dallas viewed players or who they had taken off their board at the time of selection. The Cowboys aren’t the only team to experience this either; In 2021, the Jacksonville Jaguars’ internal media released photos showing how the franchise had graded some players who were not their own picks.
Dallas just seems to happen it more often than others, which likely means they’re not nearly as concerned as other franchises about protecting player ratings as if they were nuclear launch codes.
Most of the time, when something like this happens, it fuels interest in the cowboys. Perhaps because so many fanbases live in an information desert when it comes to getting an in-depth behind-the-scenes look at how an NFL team is drafted.
It speaks to why this year’s draft decoding could be more impressive than previous incidents. Though Jones was unconcerned and literally upped the team’s rankings in a media conference, Leslie pulled arguably the grainiest photo of all the incidents, but just enough to get the ball rolling.
Cowboys team owner Jerry Jones, left, might do well to listen to his son Stephen and not see draft boards for the whole world. (Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)
It all unfolded on Tuesday when the Twitter account @CowboysStats lamented that no one got a high definition shot of Jerry Jones holding up the Cowboys draft board for all to see. This drew a response from Leslie, who posted the best screenshot he could generate from the WFAA video.
Next came — you guessed it — longtime Blogging the Boys contributor KD Drummond (who is now the editor-in-chief of Cowboys Wire), who launched a call to some of his colleagues, and the thread was handled from there.
The Result: In less than three hours, Cowboy’s Twitter pulled together the top 16 picks on the board. The set appears to be spot on and includes some of the comments Jerry Jones made when discussing Smith’s Round 1 selection.
By the end of the night, Leslie, Drummond, The Athletic’s Jon Machota and a host of others had cobbled together what appears to be an accurate representation of the top 34 picks on Dallas’ board. Interestingly, Dallas’ NFC East rivals the New York Giants landed the Cowboys’ two top-rated players — Oregon edge rusher Kayvon Thibodeaux and Alabama tackle Evan Neal — with fifth and seventh overall picks.
Dallas was also particularly impressed by Ohio State’s Garrett Wilson, whom they pinned fourth overall. Wilson went to the New York Jets, which dominated that draft if you leave the Dallas board, and landed four of the top 28 players: Wilson, Cincinnati cornerback Ahmad Gardner (5th rated by Dallas), Iowa State running back Breece Hall ( 19th) and defender Jermaine Johnson (28th).
Interestingly, Dallas had the Jaguars’ No. 1 overall, defensive end Travon Walker, in seventh place on their board. Zero quarterbacks cracked the top 34, while New Orleans Saints first-round pick offensive tackle Trevor Penning is also missing. As for the two players most analysts linked to Dallas in the 24th overall pick — guards Kenyon Green and Zion Johnson — both were rated lower than the Cowboys’ actual pick, Tyler Smith.
The overall composite top 34 on the Dallas board:
1. Kayvon Thibodeaux, LB/DE (5th in the Giants)
2. Evan Neal, OT (Seventh after the Giants)
3. Aidan Hutchinson, DE (runner-up behind Detroit Lions)
4. Garrett Wilson, WR (10th with the New York Jets)
5. Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner, CB (Fourth behind the Jets)
6. Derek Stingley Jr., CB (third behind the Texans)
7. Travon Walker, DE (first to the Jaguars)
8. Kyle Hamilton, S (14th with the Baltimore Ravens)
9. Ikem “Icky” Ekwonu, OT (Sixth after Carolina Panthers)
10. Drake London, WR (eighth behind the Atlanta Falcons)
11. Jordan Davis, DT (13th for the Philadelphia Eagles)
12. Charles Cross, OT (ninth behind the Seattle Seahawks)
13. Lewis Cine, S, Georgia (32nd with the Minnesota Vikings)
14. Jameson Williams, WR (12th for the Lions)
15. Chis Olave, WR (11th of the Saints)
16. Tyler Smith, OT (24th for the Cowboys)
17. Devin Lloyd, LB (27th with the Jaguars)
18. Daxton Hill, S (31st to the Cincinnati Bengals)
19. Breece Hall, RB (36th to the Jets)
20. Kenyon Green, OG (15th to the Texans)
21. George Karlaftis, DE (30th for the Kansas City Chiefs)
22. Zion Johnson, OG (17th with the Los Angeles Chargers)
23. Treylon Burks, WR (18th for the Tennessee Titans)
24. Kyler Gordon, CB (39th with the Chicago Bears)
25. Tyler Linderbaum, C (25th to the Ravens)
26. David Ojabo, LB (45th for the Ravens)
27. Jahan Dotson, WR (16th of the Washington Commanders)
28. Jermaine Johnson, DE (26th to Jets)
29th Kaiir Elam, CB (23rd of the Buffalo Bills)
30. Arnold Ekiketie, DE (38th to the Falcons)
31. Trent McDuffie, CB (21st of the Chiefs)
32. Quay Walker, LB (22nd to the Packers)
33. Devonte Wyatt, DT (28th to the Packers)
34. Logan Hall, DE (33rd place for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers)