NFL draft: Michigan football's Mazi Smith drafted by Dallas Cowboys at No. 26 overall
Michigan football's top run defender from the past two seasons is on his way to America's Team.
The Dallas Cowboys took former Wolverines defensive tackle Mazi Smith with the 26th overall pick Thursday night in the first round of the 2023 NFL draft.
Smith, named Michigan's Defensive Player of the Year in 2022, was a consensus first-team All-Big Ten defensive lineman last season, when he started all 15 games and had 49 tackles, including 2½ for loss, one sack, one forced fumble and one fumble recovery.
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Rated college football's No. 1 "freak" by The Athletic entering last season — which he further proved at last month's NFL combine when he led all defensive linemen with 34 reps of the bench press — Smith has been seen as a potential NFL prospect since he entered Ann Arbor as a four-star recruit from East Kentwood in 2019.
But his career didn't start off the way he expected. The 6-foot-3, 338-pound run-stuffer played in just two games his freshman season and five as a sophomore when he recorded his first three career tackles.
He made a jump as a junior, where he started all 14 games and recorded 37 tackles as a key piece of a dominant defensive line which helped propel the Wolverines to their first Big Ten title in 17 years and the program's first trip to a College Football Playoff.
Even after he put a solid year together on tape as a senior, Smith told reporters after his pro day in March, he wanted to use the offseason to be a sponge and learn from the plethora of NFL minds he interacted with.
"These coaches are getting paid a lot of money to know, to see traits, so really I’m trying to listen to what they say," Smith said last month when asked what he wants teams to know about him. "(It's about) what they see, what they tell me I need to work on, what they tell me I do good, I’m really just trying to learn.
“A lot of them guys have been where they’re at for a long time for a reason, so there isn’t much I can tell them.”
The feedback he often received, he said, was teams' desire to see more consistency with his pass rush. Many saw "flash" but wanted to see more consistent production. He also said his footwork in the run game needs work, that he's gotten away with improper fundamentals at times because of his sheer size and athleticism.
But beyond his football prowess, what many of those teams wanted to know about — and Smith met with more than 20 throughout the pre-draft process — was his gun charge, which stemmed from an October traffic stop.
Smith was pulled over for speeding in an Ann Arbor neighborhood and told police he had a firearm on him, which he'd completed a course to be allowed to carry but had yet to receive the paperwork.
He was charged with felony carrying a concealed weapon without a license, later pled down to a misdemeanor and was ultimately sentenced to 12 months of probation under the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act (HYTA).
"I just tell them the truth," Smith told reporters last month about his discussions with teams about the charge. "I mean it comes up; they’re about to invest a lot of money, so they’ve got to know the ins and outs about what you got going on. So I tell them."
Contact Tony Garcia at apgarcia@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @realtonygarcia.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan football's Mazi Smith drafted by Dallas Cowboys in Round 1
