Cowboys’ Jerry Jones needed ‘mouth-to-mouth’ after making Lamb pick

Dallas didn’t expect Oklahoma WR CeeDee Lamb to be available with the 17th pick, but they’re pinching themselves now that he’s theirs.

Cowboys fans waking up Friday morning still shaking their heads in disbelief and wondering if the CeeDee Lamb pick really and truly happened the night before should know: they’re not the only ones. As stunning a development as it seemed in the moment, that Lamb was available to Dallas halfway through the draft’s first round is even more bewildering in hindsight.

It turns out the team’s front office and staff were just as surprised as the rest of Cowboys Nation. So surprised, in fact, that there were jokes about needing CPR at the turn of events after owner Jerry Jones made the 17th overall selection remotely from his superyacht.

“We thought he was a top-10 pick,” Cowboys chief operating officer Stephen Jones said Thursday night, per NFL.com. “We never really thought we had a chance to get him. Every mock draft we did, we had him long gone.”

Even still, when it became clear that Dallas brass would have their pick of several elite players, the Cowboys played it cool, apparently fielding multiple trade offers for their selection slot.

“Those trades ultimately are supposed to add another player to be valuable,” Jones continued, via Mike Fisher, “but we couldn’t trump [Lamb].”

To viewers watching the live draft coverage, new Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy looked visibly giddy as the pick was being announced.

“You can’t have enough playmakers,” McCarthy noted, according to Fisher. “Any time you can add a playmaker to your offense, it creates more opportunities for everybody else,” referring to an already-stacked receiving corps in Dallas that includes Amari Cooper and Michael Gallup, both 1,000-yard players in 2019.

“He’s a dynamic football player,” McCarthy said of Lamb. “He carries that alpha status.”

Of course, no one would have faulted the Cowboys for shoring up their defense with the pick. Edge rusher K’Lavon Chaisson from LSU and several safeties, including Chaisson’s teammate Grant Delpit and Xavier McKinney from Alabama were still on the table; any of them would have improved a unit that struggled often last season and then lost key players in free agency.

“He has outstanding potential,” Jones said of Chaisson, as reported by The Athletic. “I look for him to have a great career. I don’t mind telling you, it was a serious thought. We talked about it. It was a key point to think about going in that direction. All of our group really spoke to it. But as much as we thought of him, and we thought a lot of him, CeeDee just took the day.”

The Joneses were, obviously, familiar with Lamb’s collegiate body of work.

“Oklahoma plays a lot of games here on TV because of the location,” Stephen said. “It’s hard not to follow Oklahoma and Texas and that group of teams. So you’ve always kind of had an eye on CeeDee and all the success that he’s had in big games. It’s been fun watching him. You just never know when you’re watching a guy like that that he could end up with a star on his helmet.”

The chance to put a player of Lamb’s caliber in the silver and blue doesn’t come along often. Jerry Jones has talked about famously passing on a young Randy Moss in 1998. That decision, it could be argued, took years off the owner’s life, especially with the way Moss’s career played out.

Jones zigged Thursday night instead of zagging like he did back then… but actually taking the transcendent receiver this time around wasn’t any better for his heart health, as he joked with DeMarcus Ware and Jamie Foxx.

“It is always a challenge not to feel a little stress on what you need,” Stephen Jones said. “But we have really good, smart people in the room, and they were very convincing. Jerry heard everybody out, and the right thing to do is always pick the best football player. That’s what we did today.”

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