Dallas Cowboys Seven-Round Mock Draft: Who The Fans Would Pick

On Thursday last week we kicked off the 2014 BTB Mock Draft Challenge in which we asked BTB members for their mock Cowboys drafts and then asked the 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 provided by the CBSSports.com big board. No trading 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 significantly 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. One of the issues of working with a big board in a mock like this is that there will always be players who are perceived to be ranked too low, and there were scattered complaints to that effect (it's funny how there are almost never any complaints about players being ranked too high). The big boards will get better as we get closer to the draft as we'll have more and better information on the prospects, so we'll definitely repeat this mock draft challenge after the Combine and free agency.

Here's the consensus seven-round mock draft that emerged from our exercise, with the comments for each pick provided by BTB-members who picked the respective players in their mock drafts.

Note that if I had simply chosen the most popular pick in each round for this consensus mock, we'd have ended up with four defensive linemen in the first four rounds, so I edited things a little.

And now for more details of last week's work: People got busy over the last couple of days, and by early Monday morning, more than 120 different mocks were submitted, most of which actually met our guidelines for this exercise. A staggering 162 different players were picked in those 120+ mocks.

In order to establish how popular a given player was, I counted 'votes' for each player mentioned in a mock draft, with each rec' counting as one vote and one extra vote for the author of the mock draft. So in an eight-player mock that received three rec's, each player got four 'votes' (three rec's and one vote for the author). Here are the favorite players per round as ranked by percentage of votes accumulated per round, with 'rank' indicating the position on the CBSSports big board published on January 29, 2014:

And now it's time for you to vote on your favorite mock draft. Below is a mock draft summary of the consensus mock as well as the four leading vote-getters from last week. (Note that I had erroneously left out the Cowboys 215th pick in my initial mock draft instructions, which is why the leading mocks don't have a third 7th-round pick)

BTB Mock Draft overview

Which of these proposed mocks do you like the most?