Where newly acquired Cowboys players rank versus their NFL peers

All that must have made even the most jaded and weary Cowboys fans feel all warm and tingly inside, even if competitive football is still three months away.

Bill Parcells, who seemingly has a soundbite for every occasion in life, has a Parcells-ism for exactly this situation:

At this point in the offseason, there are a lot of promises floating in the (thin?) air, and there’s a lot of work still to be done. One thing the Cowboys have already done is bolster their roster with free agents and trade acquisitions, which is why today we’ll take a look at the positional rankings (or percentile rankings) of the new players the Cowboys brought in and how they potentially complement the existing roster.

The idea behind positional rankings is to find a metric that makes all players in the league comparable. Currently, the only service that offers a metric for every single player in the league is Pro Football Focus (PFF), but instead of looking at the grades they assign to the players, we’re going to look at where a given player is ranked relative to the other players in the league at his position.

Example: PFF ranks wide receivers by the cumulative grade they have received so far this season. That ranking lists all 146 wide receivers who had at least 15 targets last year. Going by their overall grade, George Pickens is ranked as the seventh-best wide receiver in the league, CeeDee Lamb is 24th, and Ryan Flournoy is 18th.

Because each position group has a different number of qualifying players (e.g. the QB list only features 43 players with at least 150 dropbacks, most other position groups have more), to make the rankings comparable across all positions, I’ve converted all positional rankings to a scale of 0 – 100. The highest ranked player at a position gets 100 points, the lowest ranked player gets zero. By that logic, Pickens gets a 95 positional ranking [(1-7/146) x 100], Lamb gets an 84, and Flournoy gets an 88. With me so far?

I repeated that calculation for all Cowboys acquisitions and returning players based on the overall ranking scale provided by PFF and divided the results into quintiles, which delivers the following positional ranking groups:

A player marked in blue is ranked in the top 20% of players at his position group, a player marked in green is ranked in the top 40% of players at his position, and so on. To qualify, all players must meet some kind of minimum playtime threshold. For most positions, that threshold is 150 snaps or dropbacks, but for WRs, RBs, TEs, and specialists, the threshold is 15 targets, rush attempts, or attempts.

As you review the figures and charts in the rest of this post, keep in mind that the numbers give a directional indication of how a player performed last year, but shouldn’t be seen as a definitive statement of a player’s quality. While I’m confident that a player marked in blue had a better year than a player marked in yellow, there is probably less of a difference between players with a value of, say, 75 and 85 than the numbers and the color code would seem to indicate.

With that out the way, the table below summarizes the returning players from 2025, as these form not only the core of the team, but are also the basis from which the Cowboys decided to invest either draft capital or cap space to bolster their roster.

Because the data is based on the PFF player grades, the individual rankings are debatable, and there are probably good arguments to be made why a given player should be ranked higher or lower, and this is especially the case for borderline players who are just short of the next quintile. But overall, I think it’s a good approximation of where the team stands – based on the performance in 2025.

The Cowboys look good at QB, WR, RB and interior OL on offense, but have challenges at TE, OT, and RB depth. On defense, there are issues all over, and while there are individual standout players, there is no single position that could not use an upgrade, and that has largely informed the Cowboys roster construction this year, both in the draft and in free agency.

In the next section, we’ll look at the personnel additions by position group, starting with cornerbacks. New players are marked in bold and additionally marked as “NEW.”

The Cowboys started the season with Kaiir Elam and Trevon Diggs at cornerback, but both were jettisoned before the season was over. In their stead the team fielded a cornerback room in various stages of recovery from injury, and neither the results nor the grades were pretty.

The hope in Dallas is that DaRon Bland returns to his old form, a fully healthy Shavon Revel plays up to his talent level, and that Caelen Carson has put his shoulder, hamstring, and knee injuries behind him and can enter the season at full health. But hope is not a strategy, so the Cowboys brought in Cobie Durant, who is an immediate upgrade for the CB room and will likely start opposite Bland.

The Cowboys added two studs last year in Quinnen Williams and Kenny Clark, but also found that there’s only so much cap space you can devote to that position, so they traded away Osa Odighizuwa (positional rank:72).

The Odighizuwa trade left the Cowboys thin at the position, so they brought in two guys in Jonathan Bullard and Otito Ogbonnia to add veteran quality snaps in the rotation. Both Bullard and Ogbonnia played fewer snaps in 2025 than in 2024 and – possibly as a result – had a higher positional rank in 2025.

So the Cowboys added two veterans to spell their stars in limited snaps who will likely provide solid but not outstanding play at this point.

Wondering about Jay Toia? Toia played only 89 snaps last year, so he doesn’t qualify for the ranking (min 150 snaps), but his grade in those 89 snaps would have placed him dead last on the list of 154 qualifying players.

The Cowboys let edge rushers Jadeveon Clowney (372 snaps, 88 pos. rank) and Dante Fowler (358, 84) walk, so they needed to not only replace those snaps, but also needed to replace two blue-chip ranked players who combined for 11.5 sacks.

The Cowboys seemingly opted for a pass-rush-by-committee approach, trading for Rashan Gary, adding Charles Snowden as a late signing, and also drafting Malachi Lawrence in the first round. On paper, that looks like a good rotation, though we haven’t seen this group play a single snap of competitive football.

But the edge rushers could turn out to be sneaky good once partnered with the improved interior D-line. Ezeiruaku showed a lot of promise in his rookie season and James Houston has quietly collected 14.5 sacks in 37 career games, even if he insisted he was a linebacker and not a pass rusher in this conversation with Deion Sanders:

Sam Williams looks to have finally recovered from his ACL suffered in 2024, and even Marist Liufau has been turning heads this offseason in his new role as a pass rusher.

Of course, offseason dreams about down-roster guys turning into special players can vanish quickly once the real thing starts.

As with all the positions we’re looking at today, you can’t really tell the story of the position group without also looking at what the Cowboys did in the draft. And this is doubly true at safety, where the Cowboys brought in a potentially franchise-defining player in Caleb Downs. Still, we’re looking at the free agency additions today, and that’s what we’ll stick to.

More so than at pass rusher, the Cowboys lost a lot of snaps when they let Donovan Wilson (918 snaps, 11 pos. rank) and Juanyeh Thomas (264, 35) walk. But they look like they’ve upgraded the room with the additions of Thompson and Locke (and Downs, of course).

This is the final position group we’ll look at, specifically because it’s an oddity relative to the previous position groups where the Cowboys improved the team with their player acquisitions.

Ain’t no brakes on this party train: this is a stacked position room, which makes it a little curious why the Cowboys are adding bodies at the bottom of the position. Perhaps the team is hoping that one of these guys may turn into a viable fourth or fifth option at WR; more likely they just needed some experienced route runners for training camp, which would also explain the recent addition of Denzel Mims, who last played an NFL snap in 2022.

As we’ve seen, the Cowboys have generally done a good job of fortifying key position groups via free agency and trades and have structurally improved their roster. And unlike previous years, the front office seems to have tried to address roster holes with proven veterans rather than just bargain bin diving in free agency.

But even with the additions, the roster remains imbalanced: Good to very good at the top (blue and green) virtually nothing in the middle (yellow), and bloated at the bottom (orange and red).

No team in the league has starter-quality players at every position, especially not in the salary cap era, but you’ve got to have enough quality on your roster to sustain a season-long campaign. The top 32-35 players represent the projected starting lineup and immediate rotational depth of an NFL teams. Sufficient quality among your top 35 separates contenders from lottery teams.

Having said that, here’s a final look at the positional rankings, including the new players and a split between the top 35 and the rest.

The Cowboys will likely add 3-4 draft picks to their top 35, which should push some of the lower positional rankings out of the Top 35. Still, as it stands, the Cowboys will continue to have a sizeable chunk of players making up their roster who were in the “Underperformer” quintile in 2025.

The team hopes that a better defensive scheme, growth of second- and third-year players, as well as fewer injury red-shirts will tilt the roster balance in its favor. Strangely enough, this roster now leaves me feeling more queasy at TE, OT, and RB depth than at any defensive position.

Over to you: Which positions leave you feeling queasy, and which will require more than love, peace, and chicken grease to make you feel all warm and tingly inside again?