It is only August, and nobody is trying to fast forward. The Dallas Cowboys will officially begin their 2025 season in two weeks and we have spent many, many months looking forward to it. But eyes are constantly on the future, and with college football officially returning this week (shout out to Week 0), there is an early NFL Mock Draft from ESPN’s Field Yates worth paying attention to.
Yates made the proper acknowledgements in saying that a number of things will change in the next 6-7 months. Names we think are awesome now will fade while others will rise from obscurity. As far as the current NFL is concerned, that same exact logic can be applied. He noted that he used ESPN’s Football Power Index to establish the draft order, but obviously different teams can wind up in different places.
As far as the Cowboys are concerned, Yates had them picking at 13 and gave them Florida Gators defensive tackle Caleb Banks.
13. Dallas Cowboys
Caleb Banks, DT, Florida
The Cowboys enter the 2025 season looking to right some of the wrongs from their forgettable 2024. One big area of concern is the interior defensive line. Their porous run D (4.8 yards allowed per carry, tied for third worst) cannot continue if they want to keep contending in the NFC. Banks could help fix it. He has outstanding size at 6-foot-6 and 330 pounds, but he also displays the quickness and power to be a disruptive interior rusher. He began his career at Louisville, but his best college season came in 2024, when he had 4.5 sacks for the Gators — including 2.5 in his dominant game against Ole Miss.
Florida’s win over Ole Miss last year is regarded as one of their premier wins of last season, so the fact that Banks was such a big part of it suggests that he may have a propensity for shining brightest when the moment properly calls for it. We can dream, right?
It makes sense to project the Cowboys to take a defensive tackle in the future as the current day version of the team is still, as they have for almost the entirety of The Drought™, struggling along the interior of their defensive line. Dallas broke the mold in 2023 by selecting Mazi Smith in the first round and he marked the first time they used such a premium resource on defensive tackle since Russell Maryland, and that was so long ago that Maryland is being talked about in the current day documentary about the 90s Cowboys on Netflix.
Everything is projection at this point when it comes to both collegiate and NFL football, but it is worth mentioning that Banks was named to the 2025 Coaches Preseason All-SEC Second-Team. The point here is that there a lot of people expecting big things from him in the near future.
Will the Cowboys draft a defensive tackle in the first round again? Heck, will they be picking in the top 15 again? These are important questions that the next half year are going to answer one way or another.
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