How each Cowboys loss makes the Jonathan Mingo trade look even worse

It is one thing that the Cowboys are still losing games, but it is another that they have already squandered future draft capital on top of it.

The Dallas Cowboys have lost another game. Their 3-7 record puts them in the bottom 10 in the league, and it’s not likely to get much better as the season progresses. When a bow is tied on the 2024 season, the Cowboys should find themselves with a top-10 pick in the 2025 NFL draft.

That’s a silver lining to an otherwise terrible season, but as their draft capital improves, it also brings attention to their fourth-round draft pick that they no longer have. Earlier in the month, the Cowboys traded away their fourth-round pick to acquire wide receiver Jonathan Mingo from the Carolina Panthers. The decision was criticized because it felt like a high price for a receiver who has struggled at the NFL level, but that price keeps going higher with every additional loss. This draft pick is on pace to be just outside the top 100 picks.

When the Cowboys initially made the trade, we attempted to look at the average value of the picks they gave up and compared them to the players they got in return. The result was that the Cowboys actually came out ahead in those deals. That is good and all, but that only tells half the story. We didn’t analyze what the Cowboys could have gotten from using those picks to draft players.

The Cowboys are a good drafting team. Giving up good draft capital for a player comes with risk. Using the same metric as before, the total AV value a team should expect from a draft pick can be represented below (data courtesy of Arrowhead Pride).

For a fourth-round pick, a total AV value (with their original team) of around five is what teams should expect on average. If we looked at the last 10 drafts, starting from 2023 (they didn’t have a fourth-round pick last year because of the Trey Lance trade), this is what their haul looks like:

Looking at this list, the Cowboys have hit on eight players during that span: Dak Prescott, Tony Pollard, Tyler Biadasz, Anthony Hitchens, Dalton Schultz, Dorance Armstrong, Jake Ferguson, and Damien Wilson. All of those players easily exceed the projected AV value of five. Eight hits from 14 selections is a hit rate of 57%.

The data analysis from Arrowhead Pride also explained that a successful draft pick is defined by an AV score of 12 or more. And since all rounds aren’t created equal, there are higher expectations for picks selected earlier than others. The success rate by round is shown below for a 28-year data sampling.

This data shows that the Cowboys’ fourth-round success rate is better than twice the league average. Note: Jake Ferguson only had an AV score of 11 entering this season, but we’re classifying him as a successful pick since he’s eclipsed 12 when adding the current season.

The Cowboys’ success rate of 57% matches what teams get from second-round picks. Again, this further validates the idea that this team drafts well. They don’t hit on everything, but when you analyze the data, they come out looking very good. This makes the Mingo trade even more problematic.

On Monday night, Mingo had zero catches on four targets. He’s been with the team for two weeks and is still acclimating himself to the Cowboys’ offense. While his true value remains to be determined, the chances of him exceeding what the Cowboys would get just by making the pick isn’t encouraging. Sure, the pick could be a Fehoko or a Tapper, but there are also a lot of Pro Bowlers on that list, so the data continues to suggest this was a bad move by the Cowboys. And with that draft pick improving with each loss, it’s even more likely they would’ve selected a good player.