Cowboys Mock Draft Challenge Results: Who The Fans Would Pick

On Friday, we started the third and final BTB Mock Draft Challenge of the year. We asked you to submit your mock drafts and then asked the BTB community to vote on the mocks. But instead of simply asking people to mock away, we established some specific rules:

The mock draft had to be conducted according to the player rankings in the Drafttek.com mock draft from April 16. 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.

About 120 mocks were submitted in total, 68 of which received four or more recommendations (rec's). The results of those 68 mocks are summarized below. In total, 105 players were picked in those 68 mocks, with 676 rec's handed out, for an average of almost ten rec's per mock draft. To figure out how popular a given player was, I simply added up the number of rec's for each mock he appeared in.

The Drafttek big board had Cowboys fan favorites Chance Warmack and Jonathan Cooper (17th) ranked ahead of the Cowboys' 18th pick while DT Sheldon Richardson (18) and S Kenny Vaccaro (19) were available. This is what the 68 mock drafts ended up doing with their first pick:

Trade up for Cooper: 3
Stay put and take Richardson: 11
Trade down in first round: 20
Trade down into second round: 34

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

The interesting thing here is that absent Warmack or Cooper, the majority of mocks waited until the third round to grab an offensive lineman. The consensus opinion seems to value defensive linemen higher than offensive linemen. Also noteworthy is the run on Eric Reid. Of the 20 mocks that traded down in the first round, 17 targeted Reid, who was sitting in the 31st spot.

That kind of trade-down, as well as the other 34 trade-downs into the top half of the second round, netted the Cowboys some extra second or third round picks, which is why no clear favorites emerged in the second or third rounds, as the available picks were spread fairly wide.

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, and who will win the Dallas Cowboys pen set for the best mock draft?