‘Most overlooked player in the draft’ hopes to make name with Cowboys as UDFA

David Durden’s agent believes that if he’d played at an SEC school, he would have been a Top-100 draft pick.

But he didn’t. So he wasn’t.

The 24-year-old receiver from the University of West Florida had to wait until after Mr. Irrelevant got his moment of glory to become a Dallas Cowboy, when the team invited him to sign as an undrafted free agent.

Head coach Mike McCarthy himself made the sales pitch, a job normally handled by staffers.

“We’ve had a lot of love for this guy,” Cowboys director of college scouting Mitch LaPoint said, per The Athletic. “We’ve been on David for a long time.”

That the Cowboys knew who Durden was at all could be considered a mild surprise; just a few days before selections began in Kansas City, The Athletic named him “the most overlooked player in the draft.”

In an Apr. 25 piece, Kalyn Kahler painted a vivid 2,500-word picture of Durden without ever identifying him by name. It’s an annual exercise she undertakes- polling pro scouts, tracking pro day workouts, and crunching the tape of NFL hopefuls across the country- to find what she calls “the draft’s best-kept secret.”

Referred to only by a shadowy nickname in that earlier piece, Kahler revealed in a Tuesday follow-up that “Prospect X” was, in fact, Durden.

The mysterious 6-foot-1-inch 204-pounder had an appropriately circuitous route to the Cowboys. The native of a Georgia town of fewer than 400 people played his college ball at tiny Mercer College before a coaching change led him to transfer down to the even lesser-known University of West Florida.

And all of that came after he spent 2017 in the Gulf Coast League, playing baseball for the Boston Red Sox farm team.

“Every time he hit a ball, he ran it out,” his manager said of Durden. “It doesn’t sound like it’s a big thing. But in the Gulf Coast rookie league where it’s 105 heat index every day, it’s like, pace yourself a little bit more.”

But he was bored by baseball. Football offered Durden a much faster-paced game. He was good enough- as a receiver, returner, and even a gunner on special teams- that his UWF coordinator was “scared to death” he would transfer for his senior year after getting calls from SEC schools.

Durden stayed put because he liked his small-school campus near the ocean. The first line written in his character report was: Likes to sit on the beach and drink beer.

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But despite noteworthy speed and size and three school football records set in two seasons of play, Durden was not invited to the scouting combine. He was on the Senior Bowl watchlist but didn’t get selected. He worked out on his own, believing he was good enough to go pro and trusting someone would notice.

NFL scouts agreed, with most seeming eager to keep their interest in Durden a secret. He had 22 teams at his pro day. He took meetings, had lunches and dinners, underwent physical exams, and visited three NFL cities. Several teams kept in touch. He got a pre-draft recruiting gift package from one club. The Titans called on Day 3 of the draft, hinting at using a late-round pick on him.

When McCarthy called Durden late on Saturday, he wasn’t the only head coach working the phones. Sean Payton called Durden, too. It was down to Dallas or Denver.

For the Cowboys, their seventh-round pick had come down to Durden or South Carolina’s Jalen Brooks. They felt Brooks had a higher likelihood of being drafted elsewhere; they hoped they could woo Durden after the fact with a priority free agent contract.

Dallas won Durden over; he thinks he has more of a chance to see the field.

“We gave David some good money,” LaPoint says. “But I think the pitch really was this guy’s ability to play inside and outside and then the return value and special teams value. You’re gonna have a chance to compete there.”

Dallas “came out of nowhere” to get him. There hadn’t been much pre-draft communication with Durden, though Cowboys assistant tight ends coach Chase Haslett had been a position coach at Mercer.

The Cowboys know a little about what they’re getting in the most overlooked player in the 2023 draft. Durden similarly knows little about the Cowboys. He doesn’t fancy himself an NFL fan, and he’d never even heard about the team’s massive complex at The Star in Frisco until after he’d agreed to sign.

And now it’s where he goes to work.

“I’ve never really needed a lot of motivation to want to play the game of football. But this just will make it that much more fun to go out there and prove it: ‘Hey, you didn’t pick me,'” Durden said. “I’m ready to run into somebody.”

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Story originally appeared on Cowboys Wire