Despite recent missteps, the Cowboys have done rather well when trading draft picks for players

The Dallas Cowboys made a trade to acquire wide receiver Jonathan Mingo from the Carolina Panthers for a 2025 fourth-round pick. The move has been met with criticism as fourth-round draft capital feels high for a player who has averaged just 22 yards per game over his 24-game career and has never found the end zone.

The Mingo trade certainly raises eyebrows. When you factor production vs. trade capital, the Cowboys appear on the short end of this one. But the Cowboys aren't trading for past performance. They are betting that this second-year play will take a step forward and help their offense. Only time will tell, but that doesn't stop the Cowboys' front office from being called out for "overpaying" on this trade.

Part of the criticism comes from the fact that the front office has done little to nothing to help bolster their roster this season. Many fans have come to believe that whatever they do at this point is wrong. Another part comes from the recent trade for Trey Lance where they gave up a fourth-round pick only to get absolutely nothing in return up to this point. Fourth-round draft capital isn't chump change so we can see how handing it out for what appears to be a dart throw is undesirable. But what if we told you that the Cowboys' front office is rather decent at trading away draft capital for players?

To properly assess this, we need to compare what the Cowboys got from the players they've received against the expected results of a player selected at the pick they traded away. Before making this comparison, we need a scoring system to determine the value of a particular draft pick. Our friends at Arrowhead Pride did the work for us and we can assign values for each draft pick. It looks a little something like this...

As expected, high draft picks do considerably better than players taken in later rounds. In fact, most of the players taken after Round 4 contribute very little to nothing to their team and bring down those averages considerably. This is why trading Day 3 draft capital is a low-risk proposition since the average expectation isn't very high for that pick.

Here are the players the Cowboys have acquired for draft picks over the past 10 years, their expected AV score based on their draft pick cost, and their actual AV score during their time in Dallas. It also shows the net AV score, helping us determine if it was a good trade or not.

Most of this just confirms what we already know. Amari Cooper, Rolando McClain, Robert Quinn, and Johnathan Hankins were great trades for the Cowboys. There haven't been too many misses, and when there were, it wasn't by much. The worst trades on this list are a couple of quarterbacks in Matt Cassel and the before-mentioned Lance.

Overall, the Cowboys have done well trading picks for players. It may not appear that way because one of their biggest failures happened last year, but we shouldn't let that take away from several of the positive deals they've made over the years.

There are a couple of things worth noting. Draft capital isn't the only thing that should be considered when evaluating a trade. The cost of one's contract is a factor as well. The Quinn trade in 2019 was good, but we must also remember the Cowboys took on an additional cap cost when making that deal. Similarly, this is why the "Amari for a 5th" conjecture will never be as sloppy as many people make it out to be.

The other part is we don't know how things would have gone had they used those picks to draft players. The Cowboys are a good drafting team, and they likely could have done even better by just making the picks. In the fourth round particularly they have snagged some great players. Dak Prescott, Jake Ferguson, Tyler Biadasz, Tony Pollard, Anthony Hitchens, Dorance Armstrong, and Dalton Schultz are some prime examples dating back to 2014. Of course, players like Charles Tapper, Reggie Robinson, Josh Ball, Jabril Cox, Ryan Switzer, and Viliami Fehoko are also on that list. Sometimes they hit it, sometimes they don't.

While we will wait and see how things work out with Mingo, we should try to give Will McClay and company some latitude because more times than not, these trades work out favorably.