Cowboys NFL Draft Lesson: Taco Charlton Signs with Saints
FRISCO - In Dallas, Taco Charlton represents a first-round failure and, Cowboys fans hope, a lesson learned.
But in the NFL, the former top pick simply represents a football player who is still, after all these years, considered a functional defensive end.
The point is being proven again as the New Orleans Saints announced on Monday that they have agreed to terms with the unrestricted free agent Charlton, who most recently played for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Charlton, 6-6, 270, was originally selected by the Dallas Cowboys in the first round (28th overall) of the 2017 NFL Draft out of Michigan. He actually made 13 starts for the Cowboys from 2017 to 2018 before the team released him. He then played for the Miami Dolphins (2019) and helped the Super Bowl-bound Kansas City Chiefs (2020) before catching on with Pittsburgh in 2021.
He has 11.5 sacks, three passes defensed, four forced fumbles and one fumble recovery in his five NFL seasons, and in 2021 appeared in 11 games with one start for the Steelers and finished the season with 18 tackles, a split sack and a pass defense. In 2019, Charlton recorded a career-high and team-best five sacks for the Dolphins to go with two forced fumbles.
So what is the problem?
In that 2017 NFL Draft, the Cowboys were so intent on finding defensive end help that they “over-drafted” Charlton.
Charlton, thinking that pass-rushers were in short supply while DBs could be taken high later. And indeed, the next two pucks after Charlton were DBs Chido Awuzie (now with the Bengals) and Jourdan Lewis (still with Dallas).
In short, that year, with coordinator Rod Marinelli pounding the table for Taco, personnel boss Will McClay and coach Jason Garrett supervised a plan to draft “positions instead of players” - a crushing error that has been repaired in the last two Dallas drafts, with “need” being ignored - and first-rounders CeeDee Lamb and Micah Parsons as the rewards.
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