General Forum

I always love it when I learn something new that I couldn't possibly have thought of except that I happened to be looking at the back of a football card.

I was flipping through my '88 Topps football set, and I noticed that Everson Walls (268), Bill Bates (269), and Michael Downs (270) were all undrafted. It made me wonder if the Cowboys ever fielded an all-undrafted secondary. Sure enough, per PFR, in the 1987 season finale vs. the Cardinals (which was not a strike game), the starting DBs were Walls, Downs, Vince Albritton and Manny Hendrix...all of whom were undrafted.

Coincidently, I watched Tom Landry's A Football Life on NFLN the other day, which talks a lot about Landry's system. Apparently, "The System" included not wasting many draft picks on defensive backs. In 1987, only two drafted defensive backs APPEARED in a game for the Cowboys all season...strike and non-strike games included. 

Walls should be in the HOF ... the Walls, Dennis Thurman, Michael Downs, Ron Fellows, Waters back 5 were awesome. 

Thurman ('78) was an 11th round pick, and Fellows ('81) was a 7th rounder. Both were longtime starters and in keeping with Landry's apparently econominal approach to finding DBs. The irony, of course, is that Landry himself was a DB, so maybe he thought he could judge talent and find diamonds in the rough better than other coaches. He probably knew, too, that if he built a great front 7, the DBs would excel, and lots of coaches and organizations since have followed that blueprint.

EDIT: Landry did use 3 1st rounders on DBs during his tenure, the last in 1982, but you probably won't recognize any of their names.

Setshot68 wrote:

Walls should be in the HOF ... the Walls, Dennis Thurman, Michael Downs, Ron Fellows, Waters back 5 were awesome.