As Cowboys defy convention, could bet on Bijan be in play?
Defying any reasonable doubts they might have had about Mike McCarthy, the Dallas Cowboys decided to expand his responsibilities instead of reduce them. Next season, he won’t just manage the clock, but he’ll also call his own plays.
Defying modern convention, the Cowboys are pinning a turnaround on old ideas instead of new ones.
And defying every trend in football, McCarthy says he wants to run the ball more and throw it less.
So as long as Jerry Jones is ready to flip logic on its head, he might as well go all the way with it.
Forget what history and the experts say about the dangers of taking a running back in the first round of the NFL draft. Go ahead, Jerry.
Pick Texas’ Bijan Robinson. And defy the rest of the league to prove you can’t go back to the 1990s again.
The suspicion here is that Jones and the Cowboys secretly want to do this, anyway. With the No. 26 selection in the first round of next month’s draft, Dallas can take no bigger star than the guy who had a Lamborghini endorsement deal and his own brand of mustard while in college, and the jersey sales would soar through AT&T Stadium’s ever-closed roof before Robinson even appears at his first mini-camp.
But this wouldn’t be about merely marketing. If Ezekiel Elliott is finished (and he probably is), and if the Cowboys aren’t prepared to use their franchise tag on Tony Pollard (questionable) and if McCarthy is serious about the comments he made at the draft combine this week about wanting to “run the damn ball so I can rest my defense” (per the Dallas Morning News), then do it in style.
Did they overdraft Elliott seven years ago and wind up paying the consequences for it? Probably.
Is there a good reason why no running backs were taken in the first round last year and why none since 2018 have been taken higher than No. 24 overall? Yep, it’s because the NFL has learned that players at that position are among the league’s most fungible assets and almost never prove worth the investment in the long run.
But for every hard-and-fast rule that includes the phrase “almost never,” there’s got to be an exception, right? And few players look better primed to be that exception than Robinson, the 6-foot, 220-pound dynamo capable of flying past cornerbacks and flattening nose tackles and juking three defenders in a single phone booth, assuming a kid like him has ever seen one before.
He’s not Barry Sanders. That’s sacrilege. But Robinson’s highlight reel is filled with little spins and cuts that make the comparison seem not quite so sacrilegious, if only for a splitsecond here and there.
And if the Cowboys want to give the 59-year-old McCarthy a chance as a play-caller after parting ways with former offensive coordinator Kellen Moore? If McCarthy is insistent about the idea his team should run the ball more, even though it wasn’t particularly good at it last year?
Let him try it with a star. Look, the whole thing might be a miscalculation, but it wouldn’t be the Cowboys’ first. They miscalculated a couple of years ago when they let Amari Cooper get away and then spent two seasons desperate for a reliable No. 2 wide receiver. They miscalculated when they expected too much, too soon from Michael Gallup in his return from a knee injury. And they probably miscalculated when they handed a huge extension to Elliott in 2019.
But that second receiving threat isn’t just going to materialize out of nowhere. Elliott isn’t getting any younger. Pollard is not guaranteed to bounce back from the broken leg he suffered in the playoffs. So is it that crazy to imagine that the best help Dak Prescott can get this season would be to play in front of a kid who might become the best running back in the league?
It’s a little crazy, yes. As mentioned earlier, running backs generally aren’t built to last, and many teams who’ve spent firstrounders on them over the past decade or so have lived to regret it.
But if Robinson is available at No. 26 next month?
Here’s betting Jones won’t be able to help himself.
Having defied so much logic already, he might as well try to defy a little more.