‘Most overlooked player in the draft’ hopes to make name with Cowboys

David Durden’s agent believes that if he’d played at an SEC school, he would have been a Top-100 draft pick.

But he didn’t. So he wasn’t.

The 24-year-old receiver from the University of West Florida had to wait until after Mr. Irrelevant got his moment of glory to become a Dallas Cowboy, when the team invited him to sign as an undrafted free agent.

Head coach Mike McCarthy himself made the sales pitch, a job normally handled by staffers.

“We’ve had a lot of love for this guy,” Cowboys director of college scouting Mitch LaPoint said, per The Athletic. “We’ve been on David for a long time.”

That the Cowboys knew who Durden was at all could be considered a mild surprise; just a few days before selections began in Kansas City, The Athletic named him “the most overlooked player in the draft.”

In an Apr. 25 piece, Kalyn Kahler painted a vivid 2,500-word picture of Durden without ever identifying him by name. It’s an annual exercise she undertakes- polling pro scouts, tracking pro day workouts, and crunching the tape of NFL hopefuls across the country- to find what she calls “the draft’s best-kept secret.”

Referred to only by a shadowy nickname in that earlier piece, Kahler revealed in a Tuesday follow-up that “Prospect X” was, in fact, Durden.

Here’s what Dallas is getting in wide receiver, David Durden.#GoArgos | #Arete pic.twitter.com/28tsMFkExX

— UWF Football (@UWFFootball) April 29, 2023

The mysterious 6-foot-1-inch 204-pounder had an appropriately circuitous route to the Cowboys. The native of a Georgia town of fewer than 400 people played his college ball at tiny Mercer College before a coaching change led him to transfer down to the even lesser-known University of West Florida.

And all of that came after he spent 2017 in the Gulf Coast League, playing baseball for the Boston Red Sox farm team.

“Every time he hit a ball, he ran it out,” his manager said of Durden. “It doesn’t sound like it’s a big thing. But in the Gulf Coast rookie league where it’s 105 heat index every day, it’s like, pace yourself a little bit more.”

But he was bored by baseball. Football offered Durden a much faster-paced game. He was good enough- as a receiver, returner, and even a gunner on special teams- that his UWF coordinator was “scared to death” he would transfer for his senior year after getting calls from SEC schools.

Durden stayed put because he liked his small-school campus near the ocean. The first line…