The immediate reaction to the Cowboys’ selecting Travis Frederick at No. 31 was, at best, underwhelming. A Dallas Morning News headline the night of the first round read, “Cowboys’ execs appear glum after trade down in first round.” The collective reaction on the team’s live feed of the draft room was compared to the year prior, when there was clear jubilation over cornerback Morris Claiborne, who is no longer in Dallas. The MMQB’s Albert Breer, then with NFL Network, quoted an AFC personnel man about the Frederick pick: “Yuck.” Most teams had graded him as a second- or third-rounder. He didn’t overwhelm athletically, but not enough credit was given to the fact that he came from a pro-style offense at Wisconsin and that he had excellent technique. As one college scouting director says in retrospect, “The ceiling is important, but more important is: Where is his floor? And Frederick had a high floor.” Four years later he’s been to three Pro Bowls and was named first-team All-Pro in 2016; he’s the anchor of an offensive line that eased Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott’s transition to the NFL and powered the Cowboys to the No. 1 seed in the NFC last season. “The Cowboys got beat up for taking Frederick in the first round; people said, Oh, they reached on him,” Mark Dominik says. “Well, it ended up being one of the best picks of the whole draft.”
The 2013 draft, in summary: Eight of 32 teams (Buffalo, Cleveland, Denver, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Miami, Oakland, Tennessee) no longer have a single player from their ’13 draft class currently on their roster. In other words, just four years later, one-quarter of the league had a total washout.