Dallas Trades Fourth Round Pick in Exchange for Pacman and Lots of Funny Stories to Be Told Later

Pacman Jones is a Cowboy. Elaine Benes may tell you that the previous sentence required an exclamation mark. I disagree. I get that it’s a roll of the dice and could pan out for the Cowboys, but I think regardless of when he is reinstated, he’s not the impact player he’s made out to be. Pacman is a starter on the Luc Richard Mbah Moute All-Star team of players who get incredibly overrated because of their cool names or background stories. A reasonable man might add Dre Bly to that list, but I have a soft spot in my hear for Dre. In high school I used to roll my knee pads up and wear really long dark socks and try to emulate Bly’s tenacious coverage techniques (I only did that when I was playing football, if I did that all the time it would have looked crazy!). I was never more certain that a player was destined for NFL greatness than when I watched Dre Bly in man coverage when he played for UNC. Obviously my eye for talent is infallible, but I digress.

What Dallas really got is a very solid kick/punt returner with ability to play some nickel corner. He won’t play over Terrence Newman or Anthony Henry, and Dallas is still very likely to take a corner in the first round on Saturday. I just read an ESPN poll that 60% of the voters ranked Pacman as one of the top ten corners in the league. Seriously? They can’t think of ten corners better than Pac, so I have to do it for them. Champ Bailey, Terrence Newman, Nmadi Asamugha, Asante Samuel, Nate Clements, Mike McKenzie, Antonio Cromartie, Al Harris, Charles Woodson, Charles Tillman, and Chris McCallister all easily surpass Pacman’s abilities as a corner. I’d even put Anthony Henry, DeAngelo Hall, Dunta Robinson, Rashean Mathis, Ronde Barber and Marcus Trufant as firmly above Pacman. So Pacman is more like one of the top 30 corners in the league, i.e., he is a starting quality corner. As far as sheer corner skill, that's about as generous as I'm willing to be with him. When T.O. smoked him for about 150 yards two years ago, Pac asked T.O. to sign his shoes for him after the game, that's the kind of competitor we're dealing with here. But seriously, what a great nickname!

This is the fifth picture that came up in a Google image search for Dre Bly. Sadly, I've probably done a better job at emulating this guy than I ever did in my endeavors to cover like Dre

I’ve also heard that the strip club scene in Dallas is insane, so there should be an awesome story involving Pacman within a couple of months. Give it time, it’s going to be worth it.