01/11/2026
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He was barely old enough to buy a beer in most states when the Dallas Cowboys decided to bet their future on him.
Ninth overall pick.
The first offensive lineman Jerry Jones had ever taken in Round One since buying the team back in 1989.
The highest the franchise had drafted a lineman since 1966.
That’s a lot of history to pile onto the shoulders of a 20-year-old kid.
When the contract ink dried — four years, $12.5 million — the expectations were already louder than the locker room music. And then training camp arrived, Texas heat hanging heavy in the air, pads cracking, tempers short. From the very first Organized Team Activities, he wasn’t eased in. No redshirt year. No bench seat.
They handed him the right tackle job on Day One.
Veterans were still getting cut — Colombo, Davis, Gurode, Holland — one by one, their lockers quietly emptied. Suddenly the kid wasn’t just a starter. He was an anchor. And somehow, unbelievably, he never flinched. Started every game. Fought every snap. When the season ended, the league nodded in approval and placed his name on the All-Rookie Team. Not bad for a teenager playing against grown men with mortgages and scars.
By 2012, they trusted him enough to flip him to the most sacred real estate on the line — left tackle. New side. New footwork. New world of blindside responsibility. And he handled it like he’d been born there. Sure, there was a $15,000 fine in Week 1 after he saved a touchdown with a desperate horse-collar against the Giants. Costly? Yes. Necessary? Also yes. He started 15 games that season, and by December the Cowboys didn’t just have a young lineman — they had a pillar.
Then came 2013, the season where the league quietly realized what he was becoming.
One holding penalty.
One sack allowed.
Sixteen starts.
That’s not a stat line. That’s a statement.
The Pro Bowl followed. So did a spot on the NFL’s Top 100 list, voted on by the very players he was embarrassing on Sundays. Seventy-eighth overall, and climbing.
By 2014, the conversation around him changed. It wasn’t “he’s good for his age” anymore. It was something else entirely.
“If you went into a computer lab and tried to create the perfect prototype tackle,” Ross Tucker said, “it would be him.”
That wasn’t hyperbole. That was film study talking.
That July, the Cowboys rewarded him with an eight-year, $109 million extension — the richest deal an offensive lineman had ever signed at the time. No celebration tour. No victory lap. He just kept mauling defenders, one snap after another, until Seattle rolled into town. And then, in a league that almost never notices the men in the trenches, he did the impossible.
Offensive Player of the Week.
The first lineman in a decade to win it.
Sixteen starts.
The league’s second-best rushing offense.
DeMarco Murray bulldozing his way to the rushing title with Smith clearing the road like a snowplow.
When the season ended, his peers voted him No. 36 on the Top 100. Pro Bowl. First-team All-Pro. The kid who once couldn’t legally drink champagne was now one of the most dominant forces in professional football.
And if you listened closely inside AT&T Stadium, you could almost hear the echo of every early doubt, every raised eyebrow from draft night, every nervous whisper about trusting a franchise’s future to someone so young — all of it fading into the noise of a stadium that finally understood exactly what it had been watching grow.
