More from Albert Breer: Winners and Takeaways From the 2023 NFL Draft | How, and When, the Panthers Finalized Their Draft Decision
Jerry Jones had sold the idea that the Cowboys were taking someone else so hard that his college scouting director, Mitch LaPoint, who was in on the act, wondered whether the Dallas owner had actually changed his mind on drafting Kansas State running back Deuce Vaughn with the 212nd pick. And that was when LaPoint looked over at Cowboys VP of player personnel Will McClay, and McClay gave him a wink and smile.
Plenty of people in the room knew. McClay and LaPoint were two. The Joneses, of course, as well as coach Mike McCarthy, OC Brian Schottenheimer and special teams coach John Fassel were clued in.
But Chris Vaughn, the assistant college scouting director, and Deuce’s dad, wasn’t.
And while Vaughn knew his kid was atop the team’s draft board with what was left at 212, he didn’t smell a rat after being summoned to the war room by national scout Ross Wuensche. He’d been working on pursuing potential undrafted-free-agent targets, like most of the other scouts, to give his thoughts on a number of other prospects with whom he didn’t share a last name. He figured the Cowboys were just going in another direction.
“I’m not thinking we’re taking Deuce, because when I come in, we’re talking about a couple other players as options,” Vaughn said Sunday morning. “I commented on the guys we’re talking about, the positives, the negatives of taking him there. I’m completely team first, but yeah, there’s that inner struggle. Once we finished that conversation, we as a group decided on a player. We went on the clock; I thought we were taking that player.”
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
Jones doubled back and asked Vaughn again about one of the players in that conversation, then started on a second before stopping himself and grabbing a cocktail napkin and a pen.
How would you like to turn the ticket in on your son?
And so came about the best moment of the 2023 NFL draft.
For the elder Vaughn, what followed was a blur. He walked by Jerry Jones to give Jerry’s son, and Cowboys COO Stephen Jones, a hug. For a second, with the clock ticking down on 212, he made a beeline for the phone to make the call, worried he was running out of time (even as college scouting director Chris Hall went to input the pick electronically—the napkin was symbolic). Then, he stopped, hugged Jerry and collected himself.
“Well, go to the phone,” Jerry said.
“That when I was thinking, like, Oh my goodness, we’re gonna take him,” Vaughn says.
Anyone who follows college football is well aware of who the younger Vaughn is, and how he generated that moment by making up for what he lacked in size (he was 5'5" and 179 pounds at the combine) with production (having rushed for 1,404 yards as a junior and 1,558 yards as a senior). And all of that accomplishment is why the rest of Saturday had been really hard on the kid and his dad, and why there was that tinge of frustration for the dad when he saw his kid atop the Cowboys’ board, still yet to be drafted.
“The dad in you wants to say, Hey, my son’s the highest-rated guy on the board right now. Why aren’t we considering him at this pick?” he says. “The professional in you, is like, We want what’s best for this organization.”
There was a very specific reason for it not seeming unusual to Chris that he wasn’t asked to comment on Dallas’s top player left as the 212th pick approached, while he was tapped to give his opinion on others. That was actually part of the agreement.
During the Cowboys’ initial set of draft meetings, back in December, McClay and LaPoint told Vaughn they wouldn’t have him grade his son, and Vaughn agreed that it was the right thing to do. Vaughn joked with his wife, Marquette, about it, saying if she graded him, “He’d be the first back off the board in the draft.”
So as a matter of course, Vaughn did his work covering the eastern half of the country, then cross-checking the western half, at which point he simply skipped over his son.
“I wrote over 350 evaluations on college players in this draft. I did not write one on him,” he says. “I never did an official report on him. Did all his teammates at Kansas State. They got drafted yesterday. I evaluated all those kids, but that was our organizational decision to not have me do it. … I thought that was good.”
And, to be sure, it wasn’t for any lack of wanting Vaughn’s opinion. Now in his seventh season in Dallas, after coaching in college before that, McClay told me over the weekend that Vaughn’s become valuable because of his ability not only to evaluate but cultivate relationships at schools, which allows Dallas to access the best information on prospects.
He just didn’t think it was right to put Vaughn in the position of having to do it with his son.
All of which was fine until Saturday afternoon, when a deep running back class precipitated the younger Vaughn sliding a bit. The 21-year-old was with his mom, his college position coach and his high school coach back home in Round Rock, an Austin suburb three hours from the Cowboys’ war room. And as the wait wore on, his dad would look at the board, as he was doing his job, and try to figure out where he was going.
After Dallas made its fifth-round pick, taking North Carolina OT Asim Richards at 169, McClay and LaPoint directed the scouts to start work on the college free agents and, after retreating to his office, Vaughn got a call from his kid. They hadn’t yet talked Saturday, because, in Vaughn’s words, “I didn’t want to put pressure on him.”
“It was a tough conversation because, of course, he’s watching the draft; you feel helpless,” he says. “You’re just waiting to see when your name is gonna get called. When you’re expecting to go earlier than what’s happening, that becomes very frustrating. Now you start going into, What’s next? What do I do now? He called me, and we’re talking through the situation. It was really hard. I expected him to go before that. He expected to go before that.
“That’s the nature of the draft. That’s not anything that doesn’t happen at every draft with somebody’s child. That’s not uncommon. But whenever it happens, it’s tough. We had that tough conversation—here are the options if somebody doesn’t take you in the next two rounds.”
Meanwhile, down the hall in McClay’s office, another tough conversation was happening. Jerry Jones, Stephen Jones and Jerry Jones Jr. were huddling to talk about the possibility of taking Vaughn at 212. McClay took the Joneses through the kid’s strengths and weaknesses, and then they sorted through the potential entanglements of doing it, right down to the possibility that eventually they’d face the prospect of having to cut a coworker’s kid.
The group resolved that Deuce Vaughn was worth it, and that’s when they hatched the plan to spring the news on his dad, and created a moment no one in the room would soon forget.
In that war room, McClay had his 16-year-old son, and Jerry Jones’s grandsons John Stephen, Paxton, Shy and James were close by, too, with all three of Jerry’s kids longtime lieutenants to him with the Cowboys. So, for everyone, the anticipation of the moment was great, and seeing it play out, given the setting and the people there, was even greater.
McClay called it the coolest moment of his scouting career, and thought back to video Vaughn had shown him of a grade-school-aged Deuce running into him with a football tucked away. Vaughn himself had Deuce the middle schooler, and the memory of his kid being relegated to the B team as a seventh-grader, in his head.
“The biggest thing, especially when your kids play sports young, is how they will handle adversity,” he says. “Football is a great sport, and when you do well in football, there are always enough people to pat you on the back. For some people, that’s what motivates them. Some of them don’t love the game. They love what the game gives them. They love what it brings to you. So he got put down to the B team after always being the best player.
“Why that happened, I don’t know. But it was huge in finding out if he loved football for the game itself and not for being the star or being the starting tailback. That told me a lot about him as a football player, and I think it’s what’s kind of made him who he is. He loves the process. He loves the game, not just what the game gives him.”
It showed Vaughn that, more than anything else, his kid just wanted to play, and that continued to manifest as he became a Texas high school football star, and then the lead dog for a really good Kansas State team. It’s also why he knows his kid—after averaging 24 touches per game as a senior and 22 touches per game as a junior—will do what it takes in the NFL, even if that doesn’t mean getting the ball right away.
And like any dad would be, Vaughn is pretty excited to see how it all plays out.
With, as it turns out, a better seat to watch from than he ever guessed he’d have.
