Cowboys' draft day stories ... center Travis Frederick

Going into the 2013 NFL Draft, most analysts believed Wisconsin’s Travis Frederick ranked as the top center in the class. But a slow 40-yard dash time pushed Frederick down team’s draft boards.

Frederick ran the 40-yard dash in 5.58 seconds, the second-slowest among offensive lineman at that year’s NFL Scouting Combine. So Frederick became a fringe first-round candidate.

But, once the Dallas Cowboys traded back from No. 18 to No. 31 with the San Francisco 49ers, Frederick had a feeling he could sneak into the first round.

"[My agent] said listen, 'You’re going to get picked between 20 and 40,'" Frederick said. "He said, 'Hey, if the Cowboys trade down from 18, there’s a good chance they’re coming after you.' When they did, he turned around and kind of winked at me and said keep your phone on you. That’s exactly how it worked out."

Because Frederick had been a borderline first-round guy, he had a low-key get together at his family home in Sharon, Wisconsin. He didn’t want the letdown afterward should he have fallen to the second round.

"My family was there and a couple close friends," Frederick said. "I knew it was either going to be the end of [Thursday], so it was going to be really late into the night, or it would be the next day, so I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it in case it was Friday."

But getting the phone call from the Cowboys lived up to the hype. Frederick is the first NFL player to come from Sharon, a town of about 1,500 just north of the Wisconsin/ Illinois border.

"Draft day was exciting for me. It’s always such a cool experience,” Frederick said. "There’s a couple different ways that you see the draft and the experience of going through the draft and being a potential draft pick is a feeling unlike anything else. Just when you get that call and you know that your dreams are coming true and you’re getting a chance to play in the NFL, especially when it occurs the way that it did for me, it’s definitely a great feeling."

Frederick and the Cowboys should have no regrets. Frederick became the highest-paid center at the time he signed his extension before the 2016 season, and Frederick has done everything well on and off the field for the Cowboys.

Frederick, 27, has been named to four Pro Bowls (2014-17) and been named All-Pro first-team (2016) and second-team (2014, 2015) in his first five seasons.

The only advice Frederick would have is for teams to not read too much into the Combine numbers. Instead, check out the college film.

"There’s a lot of stress put on that training period where you’re training for the Combine, you’re working on all these drills,” Frederick said. "A great coach in the NFL, still currently coaching, told me in one of my meetings to stop doing whatever you’ve been doing for the last two months and go back to doing what you did in college because that’s what made you a good football player. That’s why you’re going to be drafted very high. Go back to that and you’ll be a good football player.

"It’s interesting because you always want to get all those numbers right. Scouts are focused on it and you look at the numbers, but I think personally, flip the tape on. Check out how you are as a football player, what your potential is there."

This story was originally published April 22, 2018 at 10:05 PM with the headline "Cowboys' draft day stories ... center Travis Frederick."