NFL Teams Graded Dallas Cowboys Center Travis Frederick as Late-Round Pick

Travis Frederick has already lost and he hasn’t even played a down in the NFL yet. Through absolutely no fault of his own, the Wisconsin Badgers center was made a first-round pick by the Dallas Cowboys and the backlash started almost immediately. The main reason for the hate is the fact that virtually no one had Frederick on the radar at the 30th overall pick, yet Jerry Jones pulled the trigger on taking him there.

We all know that Jones and the Cowboys reached for Frederick, but we didn’t have an actual grasp on how massive of a reach it really was. ESPN’s  Ed Werder decided to pile on the Frederick firestorm and polled five NFL general managers as to where they had Frederick ranked on their drat board. The results were just as you suspected — Frederick wasn’t ranked high at all.

Granted, five out of 31 teams isn’t a great gauge for how the center was universally viewed, but it does give you an idea of what team may have been thinking. But the most troubling part of the poll is the fact that one general manager had Frederick ranked at the bottom of the draft, meaning Jones took a seventh round pick in the first round.

There’s no way to tell if that general manager really thought that lowly of Frederick or if he was stringing Werder on to further inflate the story. But two GM’s had Frederick as a fifth round pick and another had him as a fourth which means there’s a good chance most of the teams around the league had the center as a mid-to-late round pick.

We have yet to see how the pick will turn out, but so far this is looking like a pick we’ll look back on in five years and still be laughing about.