Insider: Cowboys players buying into Deuce Vaughn hype
The NFL preseason seems to always provide a few great stories. There are mid-to-late-round picks who are slated to be backups that emerge from preseason looking dominant, along with undrafted free agents who receive massive hype during training camp and live up to the billing when the preseason gets underway.
That scenario appears to be well underway for the Dallas Cowboys and running back Deuce Vaughn.
The kicker? The college star who was taken in the sixth round has sent his own hype to stratospheric levels after just one preseason game. And best of all, it appears even his own teammates have already bought in.
Obviously, seeing Dak Prescott run around celebrating like a kid playing backyard football is a nice starting point.
But taking it one step further, The Athletic's Jon Machota offered a bit of an inside look at the reactions to Vaughn's touchdown from his teammates. The resounding sentiment? He's just getting started.
Any NFL knows that buying into preseason hype comes with plenty of potential heartbreak. But it's not often that after just training camp and one preseason game that multiple teammates of a player are saying something like this. Sure, the argument that teammates are showing support for Vaughn is a fair one, but his actual on-field performance backed all of this up.
Vaughn looked every bit the part of a legitimate NFL running back, carrying the ball six times for 50 yards and one touchdown while making every tough run, decision and play in general look easy. But to top it off, Vaughn's on-field performance or ability hasn't weighed as heavily on anyone's mind as questions about his size and how it would transition to the NFL.
Vaughn checks in at just 5-foot-5 and roughly 176 pounds, depending on where you look. But that size wasn't the slightest bit of an issue during his collegiate career at Kansas State.
Over three seasons with the Wildcats, Vaughn averaged 5.5 yards per carry while totaling 3,604 rushing yards, 34 touchdowns on the ground, 116 receptions, 1,280 receiving yards and nine scores through the air. He topped 1,400 rushing yards in each of his final two seasons with the school, including a sophomore season in which he racked up 1,404 rushing yards and an impressive 18 touchdowns on the ground.
While it's certainly too early to cement Vaughn as the RB2 in Dallas behind Tony Pollard, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to argue that he shouldn't be on the 53-man roster.
Even more than that, the rave reviews coming out about him from beat writers and analysts at training camp, along with players, have all the hype of a player who shouldn't just make the roster but could be in line to receive a fairly consistent workload as well.
More must-reads: