There are certain players who simply will not go away. This is said in the best possible way. Sometimes you have players who come around who you figure are surely going to be riding through their last season with the team only for them to hang on for five more. Some dudes are just built different.
Jourdan Lewis is this generation’s Orlando Scandrick. Scandrick held longer odds initially as he was initially a fifth-round pick out of Boise State when the Cowboys drafted him. Boise is a lot of fun in the college football world, but let’s not act like it is churning out NFL superstars (although this is the Cowboys to be fair). Whatever the case, the point is that Scandrick carved out an NFL career that saw him playing for this team for a decade.
The final season in which Scandrick suited up was 2017 when Dallas had an infusion of youth at the cornerback position. Chidobe Awuzie was the team’s second-round pick and the one we assumed would hang on the longest, but it was his soon-to-be very good friend who the team took one round later that is entering year number eight.
Jourdan Lewis is playing exactly the way the Dallas Cowboys need him to
Unlike Scandrick, Jourdan Lewis was a Day 2 pick (the draft was technically different in 2008 when Scandrick was in it) as the Cowboys took him in the third round. What’s more is that Lewis hailed from Michigan, but he wasn’t even the most notable Wolverine in his draft class as Dallas also took Taco Charlton and did so in the first round. That is all we need to say about that.
Lewis has withstood all sorts of change to the Cowboys secondary. He was around for Byron Jones’ peak, the Kris Richard days that we thought would change everything, the arrival of both Trevon Diggs and DaRon Bland (not to mention their amazing individual seasons) and the acquisition of Stephon Gilmore.
In fact, Gilmore is an interesting name because it seems like the Cowboys chose to go with Lewis over Gilmore in terms of free agency retentions this past spring. This may not technically be true in a literal sense, but Dallas only chose to bring one back and if we had polled the masses around here in the middle of it, most would have preferred the former Defensive Player of the Year.
Yet here we sit with two weeks of training camp behind us and Jourdan Lewis is making play after play after play after play. Tuesday was no exception.
Jordan Lewis. Mr. I guess continues his strong training camp with a pick on Dak Prescott pic.twitter.com/fm2Z2ampJn
— Clarence Hill Jr (@clarencehilljr) August 6, 2024
Jourdan Lewis. He’s had a wonderful camp. pic.twitter.com/mrsV7tW84G
— Calvin Watkins (@calvinwatkins) August 6, 2024
You’ll note that Lewis recorded the first interception of Dak Prescott with the team wearing pads. Funny how Dak’s interceptions were a constant story all of camp last year and have hardly been mentioned in the here and now. Funny indeed!
But as things relate to Lewis, the team is in a position where their top three cornerbacks are all players they trust greatly in Lewis and the aforementioned Trevon Diggs and DaRon Bland. That Dallas can so easily and smoothly rely on Lewis has left them with an incredibly high floor of play at the corner position.
It goes without saying that the offseason was incredibly frustrating, but there is an argument to be made that Jourdan Lewis may have been the most important retention that they had as he has kept them in business on the back end.
