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

On Friday last week we launched our second 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. 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 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. Also, the mockers were stuck with where a given player was ranked by CBSSports.

A little over 100 mocks were submitted in total, 49 of which received four or more recommendations (rec's) and which we've summarized a little further down this post. In total, 167 players were picked in those 49 mocks, with 363 rec's handed out.

The CBSSports big board had Cowboys fan favorites Anthony Barr (No. 12 overall) and Aaron Donald (No. 13) ranked ahead of the Cowboys' 16th pick. You would think that such a short hop would entice many Cowboys fans to move up, but that didn't happen. This is what the 105 or so mock drafts ended up doing with their first pick:

Trade up: 11
Stay put at number sixteen: 22
Trade down in first round: 40
Trade down into second round: 32

So given a scenario where Barr and Donald are gone, but Zack Martin (No. 16) and Timmy Jernigan (No. 18) are within easy reach, two thirds of all mock drafters chose to trade down. Interesting.

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 picks in each round for this consensus mock, we'd have ended up with a truckload of defensive linemen, so I edited things a little. Also, you'll notice that the Cowboys have three second-round picks in this mock. This is a result of trading down for Kony Ealy (who was available at No. 35 in the second round) and massaging the resulting haul of draft picks into an extra second rounder.

And now for more details of last week's work: 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. So in an 11-player mock that received five rec's, each player got five 'votes'. Here are the favorite players per round as ranked by percentage of votes accumulated per round.

In some instances, where the player's rank is higher than the original Cowboys draft pick, like Scott Crichton or Gabe Jackson, these players were picked with the help of a trade-up.

And now it's time for you to vote on your favorite mock draft. Below is a summary of the consensus mock as well as the three leading vote-getters from last week. All four mocks have the Cowboys trading down.

BTB Mock Draft overview

Which of these proposed mocks do you like the most?