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By Bob Sturm Jan 23, 2020
Before we get waist-deep in the 2020 NFL Draft and delve into the reality that the Cowboys will need a number of solid picks to deal with a roster requiring a talent infusion, I want to close the book on the rookie class that came before them.
This exercise is one we annually do in this space and drives home the concept of the four-year conveyor belt of talent that NFL teams deal with in the salary-capped world they live in. If you get it right, you enjoy cheap labor for four to five years after each draft class and your roster enjoys an ability to make moves to supplement your situation. If you get it wrong, you must scramble to fill spots with older and more costly veterans on one-year deals as you try to remake your roster year after year.
Time moves very fast in the NFL, and if your young players are not carrying a sufficient part of the load, it can really come back to haunt you. You might think it was just a blink or two ago that the 2015 draft was here and the Cowboys selected Byron Jones and Randy Gregory. But their contracts ran out last month. Seldom has any organization enjoyed such cheap and excellent labor as the Cowboys have from their 2016 group, but the four seasons are now over, so either that workforce disappears completely or they become exceedingly expensive. We know the answer there, as Ezekiel Elliott and Jaylon Smith already have secured $150 million in contracts with Dak Prescott sure to get $150 million more. Make no mistake, what they have provided on a cost-per-snap basis since they were selected has been an amazing bounty for this organization.
But the conveyor belt keeps turning, and with it comes a requirement that the groups which move up in the order “carry their weight” or the whole thing falls apart. Now, amazingly, the 2017 group is in their final year. That seems hard to believe, as I feel we were just debating Taco Charlton vs. T.J. Watt, but the expiration date on that class is already within sight.
Time flies in the NFL, and if you aren’t drafting well in the present tense, it becomes very obvious very quickly that the past tense becomes irrelevant in the blink of an eye.
Before we break down the 2019 Draft Class in a bit more depth and look at the troubling early returns therein, I have once again tried to give you a few visual aids to show you what we are talking about.
This first one is cut and dried. Every NFL roster is constructed in four ways. The first two columns on the left are “homegrown,” and the last two columns on the right are using players grown in other organizations (where those original teams used them as the cheap labor). Those four categories are) 1) Draft picks by team, 2) Undrafted college free agents signed by team as rookies, 3) UFA Signees or veteran free agents and 4) players acquired through trades.
One note: Once a player is signed by the team out of college, undrafted players are grouped in with the draft class. It doesn’t matter how you brought them in; if they are fresh out of college, they get added directly to your draft class from that year. That is how teams view it, and I think we should view it the same way.
The better the columns on the left are maintained, the less you have to worry about the columns on the right. But we also have to consider that four-year conveyor belt, so each season we add a new year to the top and chop one off the bottom. The 2020 workforce will only include the draft classes of 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 on their rookie deals. Anyone before 2017 will have signed a lucrative extension, and you don’t have to be a genius to know this is where things get very pricy very fast. You can only afford about 10 “big-ticket” extensions on your roster of various sizes at any one point and remain compliant to the cap. So as you examine this first chart, look at it from both perspectives: Left to right and top to bottom.
Notice the 25 red names (all unrestricted free agents who are now fully out of contract), the four green names (restricted free agents) and four blue names (team options), as well as Randy Gregory — who is still suspended by the NFL. In other words, when you see the 71 names on that board, know that only 37 are actually under contract. Everyone else requires a deal.
That leaves plenty of work to consider for this spring for the new staff.
Once you look at a roster like this — the top 10 earners and the cheap labor — then you can see how important it is to not have a draft class that tanks like 2009. And that leads us back to the “getting cute” ideas of trading back to recoup the picks lost in trades. You need quality players whom you are willing to play, not quantities of bodies who will simply fight to try to make your team.
Snap counts are the most basic currency in the NFL. You have 11 players on the field for every snap of every game. That leaves about 130 total plays for a total of 1,430 snaps per game, per team. Over a 16-game season, that will total roughly 23,000 snaps. Yes, we should also measure for quality snaps (and we do), but in this exercise, we are looking at how often these roles were filled, not how well they were filled. And, yes, it is easier for rookies to get snaps on awful teams than it is for them to play on contenders.
Now, let’s take a look at the 2019 season as we evaluate the early returns on the class of ’19 and move from there.
The average NFL team in 2019 received over 3,400 snaps from rookies, 2,642 of them from scrimmage. I will subtract all special-teams snaps from this conversation for a moment and just use plays from scrimmage in an effort to equalize the value. No offense to special-teams players; they are certainly important, but you cannot convince me a full-time player on punt teams is as valuable as a full-time player on defense (or even close), so hopefully, you will allow me this determination. A team must get valuable snaps on offense or defense from its rookie classes very quickly.
If we divide all the labor of the 2019 season just into the different years of the Cowboys “homegrowns,” here is how the last season was covered by the workforce:
As you can guess, when your 2003 draft class outperforms your 2019 class in 2019, you have a problem. Jason Witten is a legend, certainly, but you would like to think you are adding some really useful 22- and 23-year-olds who can step right in and help. Clearly, the Cowboys did not do well there. Beyond Witten, nobody took a snap before the 2010 class (Sean Lee) and the 2011 class (Tyron Smith). The 2016, 2017 and 2018 classes are all doing their part, but the drop in levels for 2019 was startling.
To demonstrate that point, we have been keeping these numbers since 2009 here, so this is the “rookie class” return in its first season. To be clear, each year is that draft class’ first season. How much did the 2009 class help in 2009 versus the contributions of the 2016 class in the 2016 season? Look below.
This last chart is also since 2009 and represents the cumulative totals of each class from opening day 2009 until right now. As you can see, the class of 2016 has already outperformed every class before it for the decade. This, as you know, is what happens when you find a starting quarterback in Round 4 as well as many starters from one group. Incredible work by all involved in that class.
As you can see above, regardless of how we look at it, 539 snaps from scrimmage and 1116 snaps overall from this rookie class is very troubling. I know some will definitely want to include Amari Cooper in that group, but that isn’t how this actually works. Yes, you used a top pick to get your wide receiver, but if you hit on your Day 2 picks — Trysten Hill and Connor McGovern — to any level, you would be fine. Collectively, they barely played. The same goes for pretty much every selection but Tony Pollard, who clearly didn’t play enough.
THE 2019 ROOKIE CLASS TOTAL SNAPS
| Player | Tot Ply Snaps | Off Snaps | Def Snaps | ST Snaps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tony Pollard | 315 | 198 | 0 | 117 |
| Ventell Bryant | 225 | 23 | 0 | 202 |
| Donovan Wilson | 154 | 0 | 15 | 139 |
| Brandon Knight | 153 | 108 | 0 | 45 |
| Trysten Hill | 128 | 0 | 124 | 4 |
| Joe Jackson | 86 | 0 | 71 | 15 |
| Luke Gifford | 58 | 0 | 0 | 58 |
| TOTALS | 1116 | 329 | 210 | 580 |
Here was their draft class in total from last April:
Let’s briefly visit about each one at the end of that first season:
Round 2, Pick 58, Trysten Hill, DT
This one has been the lightning rod of the class. He will forever be compared with two highly regarded safeties who were available there who now start already for their teams at a solid level. But, beyond that, it would be easier to certainly vouch for Hill more if the Cowboys did not seem utterly dissatisfied themselves. In fact, Hill was linked to Rod Marinelli on draft day but then, later in the season, a source told me that Rod had pretty much soured completely on him. Yikes.
Rod is now gone altogether, so it will be up to Hill to put his best foot forward quickly. His rookie year barely moved the needle, and it seemed to become a redshirt year after they traded for Michael Bennett despite his health not being an issue. If you want the rookie class in a nutshell, it would be that Trysten Hill looks like he is already on thin ice. We will dive more into his rookie season in depth as the spring goes along.
Round 3, Pick 90, Connor McGovern, G
He barely played in training camp and then immediately went on injured reserve with a torn pectoral muscle. His rookie-season ceiling could have been to take over at left guard, but now he enters 2020 with nothing but mystery surrounding where he fits in. Still plenty optimistic after his impressive college career, but we saw nothing in 2019.
Round 4, Pick 128, Tony Pollard, RB
The Cowboys needed to add juice to their roster, and Pollard checked many of the boxes. He is an exciting player and his ceiling seems quite high. He was easily their best rookie (almost by default) but verified it with a few days this season where he stole the show. Unfortunately, the Cowboys never fully demonstrated the ability to know how to use him consistently, and there were games when he pretty much just watched Ezekiel Elliott. Also, his fumble in Philadelphia will leave a bad taste in mouths, as that single play helped seal Dallas’ fate in 2019. If they can find a way to share the field and share the snaps, you might be able to recreate Mark Ingram/Alvin Kamara a bit, but the Cowboys have not shown a willingness to reduce Elliott’s role, and therefore Pollard might have to do what he can with 10 to 12 snaps a game. But he seems capable of so much more.
Round 5, Pick 158, Michael Jackson, CB
Jackson was brought in to offer cover to all of the expiring deals in the Cowboys secondary in 2019 and 2020 but was unable to make the team out of camp. He then headed to the practice squad, where he was poached by the Detroit Lions. He never played a snap on defense for either team in his rookie year and was largely inactive in Detroit, but he is no longer in the picture here.
Round 5, Pick 165, Joe Jackson, DE
Joe played in each of the first four games and then was inactive in 11 of the last 12 as he got lost in the shuffle of veterans trying to get to the QB. He had no special teams value, either, so he lost the game-day spots to veteran Kerry Hyder and second-year DE Dorance Armstrong. It is not uncommon for players of this profile to need a year, but this is another rookie who didn’t make a ripple.
Round 6, Pick 213, Donovan Wilson, S
Wilson is a local favorite amongst the Aggie contingent and definitely caught eyes in the preseason for his play in the secondary. He has an upside, but he was hurt late in the preseason, which might have stunted his growth and progress. He still ran special teams almost the entire year and was incredibly useful there but played very little safety aside from the Rams game, even when injuries required backups to play. He certainly was in the mix, but the coaches opted for Darian Thompson instead.
Round 7, Pick 218, Mike Weber, RB
Like Michael Jackson, Weber was part of the cuts in August and then ended up as a member of the practice squad in 2019. Upon his season ending, he was signed to a similar spot with the Kansas City Chiefs for 2020. There was never a place behind Elliott and Pollard, so we assume he was drafted as insurance against holdouts and injuries.
Round 7, Pick 241, Jalen Jelks, DE
The Oregon product is another potential edge player whom I liked last summer, but he spent the entire year on injured reserve. This type of player often does receive a season on injured reserve to keep him off waivers and the practice squad circuit, so I would not read too much into his results yet. The ranges for him in 2020 appear endless, as the Cowboys have many vacancies and we will have almost no idea what they actually think of him until training camp 2020.
I will certainly stop short of saying this is the lost draft of 2009, but the early returns are certainly less than acceptable. They all are still very young, and a few could still be real solid contributors or even starters. But as you can see on the conveyor belt of talent, you cannot afford many drafts like this one.
That only doubles the importance of getting back on the right track this spring. They need to refortify their roster to mitigate the 25 UFAs and the red all over their depth chart.
