you want to sit here and say that Bryant is a different story, for most of the teams in the league, the result was the same. From day one of all this draft coverage, Bryant has done nothing but drop. He was a top-five talent and the next thing you know he's falling to the mid-20s. Why is that, again? Did he get hurt? Did he get arrested recently? Or have teams just bought into the hype that he's a bad guy?
Whatever the reasoning, the Cowboys obviously weren't scared off. I bet it's safe to assume that if the Moss situation did anything, it made Jerry do even more homework on Bryant than he might have before.
As it turned out, it seemed like the more the Cowboys dug into Bryant, the more they liked him.
"There's really some good information there - really good input from where he's lived and where he's gone to school. There's great information out here," Jones said Thursday night. "That doesn't mean every bit of it was A-plus on a measurement information, but there was real good information and it got very consistent. The more people we talked to, the more people he'd been around, it really came in there with the consistency that we feel like we know him.
"Maybe sometimes you don't feel compelled to do and go to those lengths to delve into that, but we did and we wanted to. The reason all along is that we thought he could potentially bring that kind of dimension to our team, and to our offense and to our return game - punt return - but certainly to the team itself. I'm convinced that relative to the other players on the board, from a talent standpoint, from the ability that given being on the field and given competing, that he has a chance to be a game changer."
During his press conference, Jerry used words such as explosive, dynamic and, of course, game-changer. But he didn't leave out the word "risk." He knows there is a risk involved, but at the same time, taking Bryant at No. 24 is much different than grabbing him in the Top 10, even though that's exactly where the Cowboys had Bryant rated.
"I think that probably we mitigated a lot of the risk in the pick to some degree by getting to get him where we got him as opposed to where we had him graded," Jones said. "We felt all along that you can mitigate that risk the lower you go in the first round."
The Cowboys mitigated risk, went lower in the first round and then when it appeared Baltimore was primed to take Bryant at No. 25, Jerry got on the phones and made it happen with the Patriots, moving into the 24th spot to get the guy he wanted all along.
Sure, Jerry told us he had three players targeted in this draft - Earl Thomas, Mike Iupati and Bryant.
But only one of them can help rectify an admitted mistake from 12 years ago.
