Wentz and Prescott: From Senior Bowl to Sunday opponents
Carson Wentz left the Senior Bowl in January thinking there was a chance that the Dallas Cowboys could draft him.
Carson Wentz left the Senior Bowl in January thinking there was a chance that the Dallas Cowboys could draft him.
"Absolutely," he said last week.
It made sense. The Cowboys held the No. 4 overall pick in the draft, and they had just spent a week in Mobile, Ala., working closely with the North Dakota State quarterback that many had tabbed as a top 10 prospect.
Dallas didn't necessarily need a quarterback, but the 36-year-old Tony Romo was coming off another injury-plagued season. Some evaluators deemed Wentz, who played for the Division I-A Bison, the ideal rookie for the Cowboys because he would need to sit and learn for a year.
The Eagles, meanwhile, watched Wentz practice from afar. They had only the No. 13 pick at the time.
"I think if you got to work with a guy for a week like that, it's an advantage," Eagles offensive coordinator Frank Reich said. "You get maybe a rawer look and not a rehearsed look."
But Reich and the Eagles' contingent of scouts and coaches didn't need to be in the huddle to know that Wentz was going to be something special. Reich was less than a week into his new job before he flew down to Mobile to get his first glimpse of the quarterback that January.
He said he needed only a few days to realize that Wentz was the real deal. On his third day there he bumped into Bruce Tollner, the son of Ted Tollner, whom Reich knew when Tollner was the Bills' receivers coach in the 1980s.
"I remember just telling him how good I thought Carson was going to be based on what I saw and based on our first interview with him," Reich said last week. "Just even there I had a good feeling about him from the start."
The Cowboys liked Wentz and would eventually have him ranked as their top quarterback. But on their draft board, at least the one leaked to the website Blogging the Boys, Wentz was the 11th overall prospect, 10 spots behind Ohio State running back Ezekiel Elliott.
The Eagles, of course, took Wentz second overall after engineering two trades to move ahead of the Cowboys and other teams. And then two picks later, Elliott went to Dallas. But the Cowboys did end up choosing a Senior Bowl quarterback. They took Mississippi State's Dak Prescott from the opposite roster and in the fourth round.
Nine months after the Senior Bowl and five months after the draft, Wentz and Prescott will meet as the Cowboys host the Eagles on Sunday. They come together not only as the two hottest rookie quarterbacks but also as potential long-term NFC East rivals.
And it's unlikely many saw the possibility for either in Mobile, although Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told a CBS11 Dallas broadcaster in early September that Prescott was the best quarterback at the Senior Bowl "and that included a guy named Wentz."
The leaked draft board, of course, said otherwise.
"I had not heard that," Wentz said last week.
The Cowboys actually had a fourth-round grade for Prescott, who was listed one slot below Louisiana Tech quarterback Jeff Driskel. Prescott had an inconsistent week of Senior Bowl practices for the South squad.
"I think it was just missing a couple of throws," Prescott said.
But he reportedly dazzled during many of his individual meetings with teams, and he was sharp in the game, completing 7 of 10 passes for 61 yards and a touchdown. Prescott was named MVP.
"That was a favorable impression," Cowboys coach Jason Garrett said. "We got a chance to meet with him a little bit as well. . . . But I feel we knew the guys on our side a lot better than we knew the guys on their side."
Garrett said that Wentz "was impressive" during the week. His performance was enough for many scouts who questioned whether he could throw against top competition. If there were incomplete passes, his receivers were often to blame. The velocity of his tosses resulted in some drops in both practice and the game.
"Some of them weren't caught, I feel like, because they were that good," Prescott said.
Wentz completed 6 of 10 passes for 50 yards in a losing cause. But he was the winner of the week for many evaluators. The Cowboys had their microscope on him all week, but they weren't the only team enamored by the 23-year old.
"It was a great for me personally, for being around those guys," Wentz said of the Cowboys. "But that's just the draft process. I thought maybe I could go to 32 different teams for a while there."
The Senior Bowl is just the first major event in the lead-up to the draft. The combine, pro days, private workouts, and formal interviews are all part of the offseason calendar, but too much can often be made of their functionality.
"I don't want to understate it because it's very important to the process," Reich said of the Senior Bowl. "But it's just kind of an introduction, seeing how they handle themselves in a group setting. The evaluation process is just a small piece of it."
The Eagles met with Prescott as well and came away impressed. He has similarities with Wentz. They were both winners in college. Wentz won two Football Championship Subdivision championships. Prescott went 19-7 as a starter his last two seasons. They're both football junkies.
"He was impressive to us, first and foremost," Garrett said of Wentz, "because of his passion for football."
Wentz and Prescott said that they didn't spend much time together in Mobile except for a few lunches. But they got to know each better during the rest of the draft process. There's a chance they may have crisscrossed each other on flights to Philadelphia and Dallas.
"Throughout the process I got to know him a little bit. I got to talk to him," Wentz said. "Great guy. Great dude. And it's exciting to see he's having some success as well. It will be a fun one to go play him."
They aren't exactly competing against each other, but Sunday could be the first of many games opposite each other. The Senior Bowl was a fitting start.
@Jeff_McLane