ESPN’s Matt Miller: How Jerry Jones & the Cowboys Could Blow Up the NFL Draft

Matt Miller pulls up a Giants wish list and starts pricing it out. Best case at five and ten, John Harbaugh and Joe Schoen on the same page, the room walks away with Jaxson Dart and Caleb Downs. Or flip them. Take Downs at five if the nerves kick in. Rich pushes back. Wouldn't Downs still be there at ten. Miller says yes, probably, but only if Washington, New Orleans, and Kansas City go receiver in front of them. Safeties always fall. Kyle Hamilton, his number three overall player a few years back, slid to seventeen and is now great in Baltimore. Harbaugh does not have him anymore. The Giants have decent safeties in Jevon Holland and Tyler Nubbin. They are not Caleb Downs.

The conversation pivots to Dallas. The player the Cowboys are quietly working to trade up for is Sonny Styles. Miller calls it wild for a non-premium position. Every call he made last week pointed Dallas toward Styles, and they may have to climb to five or six to get him. They sit at twelve and twenty, so the ammunition is there. Rich asks the obvious question that fans keep asking. Why is the Styles position not valued. Miller does not have a clean answer. He just keeps pointing at the tape. Styles and Jihaad Campbell were unblockable in the Big Ten. Top ten picks for a reason. Styles ran one of the best combine workouts Miller has ever seen.

The comp Miller goes to is Fred Warner. A closer. An eraser. He throws in a Brian Urlacher reference for the older fans, the former safety who slid to linebacker and turned into a quarterback of the defense. In a draft without a true blue chip left tackle and only two edge rushers worth taking early, why not take the guy who made Arch Manning look uncatchable for two straight years. Solve the linebacker spot for a decade.

Then the wild prediction game. Miller leads with Jordan Addison going to the Giants at five. Rich kills it. Not big enough. He wants Nostradamus. If it lands, they play it back. If it busts, it never happened. Miller takes a breath and gives him Dallas trading up to three for Jihaad Campbell. Rich punches the air. That one they punch up. The Cowboys move from twelve, leapfrog the field, and grab the linebacker the rest of the league thinks they have been calling on.

Miller wanted a real player trade in the prediction. A.J. Brown is locked out by the June 1 cap rules. Jonathan Greenard, in his words, would not have gotten the segment past Rich anyway.