The Dallas Cowboys and owner Jerry Jones passed on Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in the 2013 NFL Draft because of “red flags” they saw in him, according to the Kelce brothers’ New Heights Podcast.
The main red flag that caused the Cowboys to pass on Kelce was the fact that he was suspended for a year in 2010 for testing positive for marijuana at the University of Cincinnati.
The Dallas Cowboys ignored this red flag just a few years later
Despite letting Travis Kelce fall to the Kansas City Chiefs in 2013 due to the “red flag” of using marijuana, the Dallas Cowboys ignored this exact same “red flag” in the 2015 draft when they took defensive end Randy Gregory from the Nebraska Cornhuskers.
While Gregory wasn’t suspended for marijuana use during his time at Nebraska, which might mean that the Cowboys and company were unaware of his habits, he quickly became one of the faces of marijuana use in the NFL due to the egregious amount of drug tests he failed.
In an article from The Athletic, Gregory claims to have failed about 100 NFL drug tests. In 2021, Gregory had been suspended for 52 of the 96 games he was in the league at that point. Gregory said in the article that owner Jerry Jones had his back through all of it.
“He’s had my back through all of this,” Gregory says. “Whenever I felt like my career was about to end, I’d get a call from Jerry, and he’d come at me in the most gentle ways possible and be like: ‘It’s all good. Do what you have to do to make sure you’re good. That’s what I care about right now. I don’t care about the football.’ It’s nice to be valued like that because I can guarantee you no other team would have done what Jerry and (Cowboys CEO) Stephen (Jones) did for me, other than maybe the Raiders. I would have been out of the league already. I owe them a lot.”
The Dallas Cowboys weren’t the only ones to pass up on Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce
The Dallas Cowboys weren’t the only team in the NFL to pass up on Kelce as he was selected with the first pick of the third round. Even the Chiefs passed on Travis Kelce initially.
Wild: Apparently the #Cowboys did not draft Travis Kelce because of the ‘red flags’ the team had because he smoked weed 🤯
(Via @newheightshow)pic.twitter.com/Z243zmV1PQ
— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) March 5, 2024
Kelce wasn’t particularly highly touted coming out of Cincinnati as he only had one real year of production with the Bearcats. He had 722 yards receiving and eight touchdowns in 2012. Before that, his best season saw him amass 150 yards receiving and two touchdowns.
Here’s a little Cincinnati Bearcats Travis Kelce action for you. 🍿 pic.twitter.com/dQAJiKKOBA
— College Football Alerts (@CFBAlerts_) July 6, 2023
Instead of Kelce, Dallas went with tight end Gavin Escobar from San Diego State in the middle of the second round. Escobar had three solid years of production, putting up very similar numbers to Kelce in the 2011 season with 780 yards receiving and seven touchdowns.
The safe pick for the Cowboys did not pay off as Kelce has made a serious argument as one of the greatest tight ends in the history of the NFL during his time with the Kansas City Chiefs.
Kelce has three Super Bowl rings with the Kansas City Chiefs and he is the fastest tight end to reach 11,000 yards receiving. He is on pace to pass another Kansas City Chiefs legend, Tony Gonzales.
Other tight ends taken before Kelce in the 2013 NFL draft were:
- Tyler Eifert (Cincinnati Bengals)
- Zach Ertz (Philadelphia Eagles)
- Vance McDonald (San Francisco 49ers)
Zach Ertz is the only tight end that is still in the NFL.
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