Cowboys Mock Draft Challenge: If The Fans Got To Pick For The Cowboys

On Tuesday, we started the BTB Mock Draft Challenge for the second time this year. We asked BTB members to submit their mock drafts and then asked the BTB community to vote on the mocks. But instead of simply asking for a list of randomly put together names, we limited the flexibility by establishing some specific rules:

The mock draft had to be conducted according to the player rankings in the Drafttek.com mock draft from March 26. Only one trade down was allowed, and trading up was only permissible if the trade value points given up were equal to or greater than the trade value points received.

This limited the options in the mock drafts and forced the mockers to make decisions that they might not have had to make with a less rigorous approach. Also, the mockers were stuck with where a given player was ranked by Drafttek.com.

The winning mock was put together by BTB-member connor.cmr, but before we get to that, let's look at some of the highlights from the mock draft challenge. People got busy over the last couple of days, and more than 100 different mocks were submitted, most of which actually met our guidelines for this exercise. To look at the highlights of our collective effort, I took a closer look at the mock drafts that had met the rules of the contest and received at least one recommendation by 6:00 AM on Saturday morning. In total, of the 100+ mocks submitted, 74 qualified for the summary below by receiving at least one recommendation (rec').

In order to establish how popular a given player was, I summed up the number of rec's for each mock the player appeared in. In total, 135 players were picked in those 74 mocks, with 436 rec's handed out to those mocks. And without further ado, here are some top-line thoughts on what we saw in the mock drafts.

Nobody likes to trade up in the first: The Drafttek big board had Cowboys fan favorite OG Chance Warmack (11th) and safety Kenny Vaccaro (16th) ranked ahead of the Cowboys' 18th pick while DT Sheldon Richardson (18) and OG Jonathan Cooper (22) were available. Predictably, the mockers traded down in droves. This is what the 74 mockers decided to do:

Trade up: 2
Stay put: 5
Trade down for Cooper: 33
Trade down in first round: 9
Trade down into 2nd round: 25

Now if only the Cowboys could find a trade partner in real life...

You can't go wrong with linemen: The top vote-getters in rounds 1-4 were either offensive or defensive linemen.

Here are the favorite players per round as ranked by the percentage of rec's accumulated per round, with 'rank' indicating the position on the Drafttek big board:

If you look at the leaders in each round, that's probably as close to a BTB consensus mock draft as we'll get: Cooper and Short in a one-two-punch would already be enough for most fans to call this draft a succes. Add another offensive lineman in the third, perhaps a linebacker in the fourth, a running back in the fifth and some offensive skill positions in the sixth, and there really isn't much more you can ask for in a draft.

Naturally, all that this means of course is that the Cowboys will do something completely different.

Here are the four mocks with the highest number of rec's in our Mock Draft Challenge:

BTB Mock Draft overview

Which BTB-member do you think proposed the best mock for the Cowboys in the Mock Draft Challenge?