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What went wrong for the Cowboys in the 2022 NFL draft

The best way to enter the NFL draft is having as few true needs as possible. It’s a route the Dallas Cowboys have often tried to take. They fill holes in free agency with cheap veterans so that when it’s time to turn the card in they can just go down their board and get tremendous value at each slot. The 2022 version of the Cowboys didn’t do that.

In fact, they took the opposite route by intentionally creating more holes that needed to be plugged in the months leading up to the league’s biggest offseason event. It started with trading wide receiver Amari Cooper, continued with the Randy Gregory fiasco and ended with releasing right tackle La’el Collins.

The front office made a couple moves in order to mitigate the losses of Gregory and Cooper by signing Dante Fowler Jr. and James Washington, but the latter wasn’t enough to erase the need on the outside and the former isn’t nearly the same caliber of player that Gregory was on the edge. The team was left scrambling, something that continued into the first two rounds of the draft.

Round 1: Tyler Smith, OL, Tulsa

If the first 23 picks of the NFL draft had happened in any fans’ mock draft simulation, they would have restarted it like a kid rage quitting a game in Madden. It was an absolute nightmare scenario. There was just one quarterback being taken before Dallas was on the clock. All of the wide receivers were taken. The two guards, Zion Johnson and Kenyon Green most commonly sent the Cowboys’ way were on their way to different cities.

Jerry Jones and company would tell you (and show you by way of the board that he held up) that Tyler Smith was their 16th graded player, but that flew in the face of the consensus board put together by Arif Hasan at The Athletic, who had him ranked as the No. 47 prospect.

To be certain, teams often know more than the media members whose rankings are used in these types of situations, but the bottom line is this: The Cowboys took a…

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