The first two phases of free agency are officially over. While there are still more than a handful of players who can immediately help their squads, two weeks-plus have gone by and the surge is most definitely over. The Dallas Cowboys have brought back seven of their own free agents, added eight from the outside and have done a good job on each individual decision and negotiation, even if the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The focus now and for the next four weeks will be the amateur draft.
Early in the process, mock drafts focus on the teams biggest offseason needs, but teams meet some of those needs during the first phases of free agency, opening them up for other pursuits in the draft. Not the Cowboys, of course, because they only use free agency to plug leaky holes instead of fixing the boat permanently. In this way, their mock draft targets tend to stay consistent throughout the offseason, but the teams which pick ahead of Dallas change, sometime altering the product pool the Cowboys are diving into.
In our latest trek across the land, we find a handful of multiple round affairs, which we’ll line up first. It’s quite obvious that the Alabama corner has achieved consensus status as a whopping 12 of 18 mocks polled shipped Patrick Surtain II to Dallas, and he was already off the board in a couple of the others. However another name has trended upward as a viable candidate for No. 10 overall. Dive in to see who.