The Morning After: Cowboys Draft 2024
The Thought Process and the Evaluation Process meet to make the selections that must fix their problems quickly.
I don’t do draft grades.
This always used to irritate my old bosses, but I think my logic is sound and reasonable.
A draft grade is consumed by people that want you to evaluate how well the team in question performed the task of adding the best possible pieces to their puzzle with the resources they possessed.
But, this isn’t what a writer does.
Instead, it is 100% based on whether a team did what you and the rest of the media thought they should do. As in, did they agree with you which introduces miles of bias that is not relevant or even logical.
If a media guy spends 100 days and two hours a day preparing for the draft, that is a lot relative to the profession. In fact, I assume most media folks who cover the draft spend considerably less than 200 hours preparing for this it. But, they talk as if it is all they do all year. They are speaking as if they know more than what they do, because their bosses want them to have a hot take to get clicks going.
Teams, meanwhile, have 25 guys (a full scouting department) who do this sort of thing all year for their entire careers. Scouting, investigating, analyzing hundreds of amateur players a year and thousands of players over the course of their careers. They are not always right, but if they are wrong often, they get fired.
I have never really seen a media member get fired for giving a wrong draft grade. They may get laughed at for panning the Patrick Mahomes pick, but they don’t lose their careers.
Why?
Because that isn’t their paid career objective.
I just didn’t want to live a lie and I always have felt it is important to be authentic and real with the audience. And to anyone who wants to be a media guy some day, I would suggest rule No. 1 is this:
“I never trust people who are ‘sure’ of things. I trust those who are temporarily confident in their current interpretations.”
In other words, it is OK to admit what we don’t know. It is OK to say we are flying a bit blind with limited information. And it is OK to not give a grade one hour after a draft.
So, I don’t. And I also don’t really have a boss anymore, so that is cool, too.
But, we didn’t come here to talk about me. We came here to investigate and discuss the Cowboys decision making in the 2024 Draft Weekend.
I think it is fascinating to see their actions, listen to their explanations, and cross-examine it with similar drafts and decisions made over the course of their careers. We have been doing this a long time and there is plenty of information for those of us who collect it.
So, without any further expository in set-up, let’s dive in to a series of topics and questions and answers.