Strahan Reveals Cowboys’ Jimmy Broken Draft Promise
Promises and promises. The Dallas Cowboys’ defense was tough enough in the 1990s, but it could have been deadlier: fresh off a victory in Super Bowl XXVII, the Cowboys had the 29th pick in the next NFL Draft, the final pick of the first round normally reserved for champions. According to Michael Strahan, if Jimmy Johnson honored his promise, his name would have appeared in that place.
“Jimmy promised he was going to draft me to the Cowboys and flew me to Dallas,” Strahan told Tom Brady on the “Let’s Go!” show. “I met Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin and all these guys.”
At the time, Strahan had established himself as a legitimate NFL prospect at Texas Southern, a Division I-AA (now Football Championship Subdivision) school in his native Houston. Strahan was seemingly destined for Dallas to the point where he was in possession of a Cowboy contract on draft day and was ready to sign upon submission of the selection card.
But that call never came: instead, Dallas transferred the 29th (along with the 112th) pick to the Green Bay Packers in return for Green Bay’s second, fourth, and eighth round picks, as well as an additional second pick acquired from San Francisco. The Packers eventually selected Alabama safety (and future Cowboy) George Teague to finish the first round, forcing Strahan to be patient. He was finally selected by the New York Giants with the 40th pick, six picks before Dallas went on the clock with the first Packer selection.
Strahan humorously recalled confronting Johnson, his current Fox Sports colleague, years after the incident. “I say to Jimmy, ‘You lied. You promised me,'” a laughing Strahan told Brady.
“He said, ‘Well you know I thought you were going to drop and I can get you a lot lower, plus I didn’t know you were going to be any good.'” Skipping Strahan may be remembered as one of the few, if not the most egregious, mistakes of the Johnson era: each of the four players chosen in his place at No. 29 (Kevin Williams, Darrin Smith, Derrick Lassic, Reggie Givens) was off the Dallas roster by 1997, while he went on to become one of the Cowboys’ most recurring antagonists as a career member of the division rival Giants.
Strahan amassed 141.5 sacks and a Super Bowl ring over 15 blue seasons (1993-2007) and was later inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014.
Strahan couldn’t help but wonder about the hypotheticals behind his helmet sporting a star rather than a lower-case New York. “If I had been a Cowboy, my life would be completely different,” he remarked. “(But New York) had been literally the ideal place for me, and it’s a terrible city to play in because of the strain of daily media, the scrutiny… but, man, I was so young and came from Germany. I didn’t realize this was what I had to accomplish.”
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