Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Bill Parcells era in Dallas is the Cowboys insistence on finding treasure in another team's trash. Ever since the remarkable lottery ticket of grabbing offensive tackle Marc Colombo off the scrap heap and turning him into a top-line starter, the team has been enamored with grabbing former first-round picks who didn't work out with their drafting team.
Parcells insistence that they were first-round picks for a reason is sound thinking, but that normally comes with extenuating circumstances of bad injury luck, like Colombo had in his time in Chicago. Grabbing players who just didn't work out has crept into the Jerry Jones way of doing the deed, and it doesn't work out at nearly the same level of success.
One
such example is when they traded away a fourth-round pick to acquire QB Trey Lance from the San Francisco 49ers. Lance was recently named the biggest draft mistake in the last decade based on the price the 49ers paid to acquire him.
Drafted: No. 3 overall, 2021
This was the clear-cut answer for the No. 1 spot in these rankings. It has as much to do with the San Francisco 49ers' process as the pick itself.
The Niners wanted to move up from the 12th pick to take a quarterback, but they weren't sure which one they wanted. Despite not knowing, they gave up first-round picks in 2022 and 2023 and a 2022 third-round pick to move up from No. 12 to No. 3 a month before the draft.
The player whom they reportedly originally wanted, Mac Jones, ended up being available at No. 12. But at some point, head coach Kyle Shanahan decided he wanted Trey Lance instead of Jones.
A whiff like that can lead to the firing of a head coach and GM, but Shanahan and John Lynch avoided the hot seat by drafting Brock Purdy with the last pick of 2022 draft. He went from Mr. Irrelevant to an MVP candidate.
The Cowboys ended up paying $6.2 million in salary to Lance to be Dak Prescott's backup, but that never materialized into competent QB play under then head coach Mike McCarthy. Lance moved on to be Justin Herbert's backup with the Los Angeles Chargers last season. He now has a career 2-4 record as a starter, throwing five TDs and five INTs across his 16 career appearances.
The 49ers drafted safety Malik Mustapha with the 2024 pick (No. 124)they got in the trade.
This article originally appeared on Cowboys Wire: Bad trade acquisition, Cowboys $6M investment is NFL's top draft mistake
