It's unlikely that Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel will fall out of the top 10 -- with interested teams like the Buccaneers, who draft seventh, and the Vikings (No. 8) there to catch him if he drops at all, and other teams potentially interested in trading up for him if he manages to get beyond those clubs.
What if he does start to slide, though? What if he's available when a team he has been linked to in rumors for weeks -- the Cowboys -- are on the clock with the 16th overall pick?
That's apparently a scenario Jerry Jones & Co. are rooting for, but they don't intend to draft Manziel, according to NFL Media insider Ian Rapoport.
"(The Cowboys) would love to be on the clock with Johnny Manziel sitting there, but not to take him. Not to take him," Rapoport said Sunday on NFL Network's "NFL Total Access". "Just so they would have some ammunition for a potential trade for some team wanting to come up and grab Johnny Manziel."
Consider your bubble burst, all those clinging to hopes of seeing Johnny Football stay in his home state to play in Big D. And Jones can probably forget about some team paying a steep price to trade into the Cowboys' spot to land Manziel, now that Rapoport has reported Dallas doesn't plan to draft him.
The Manziel-to-Cowboys rumors have persisted, even though NFL Media senior analyst Gil Brandt knocked down the idea as soon as it started to gather steam last month, in part because Dallas hasn't publicly shut the door on drafting Manziel.
Brandt said he didn't think Manziel would be available to the Cowboys at No. 16, and he didn't see Jones, who's always in win-now mode, making the move for Manziel -- even if he did happen to slide to them.
The same holds true now.
It just seems a whole lot less likely that any team will buy into the possibility that it'll miss out on Manziel if it doesn't trade up to get the Cowboys' pick.
