Nearly one week after the 2025 NFL Draft concluded, stories are still trickling out about prospects who received prank phone calls on presumably private numbers about being selected.
Add running back Ashton Jeanty to the list, although his story has a bit of a twist. After being selected No. 6 overall by the Las Vegas Raiders, Jeanty received a call telling him that he’d been traded to the Dallas Cowboys. However, the running back’s fake news detector immediately set off and he knew that the conversation — which occurred 30 minutes after he’d been picked — was a farce.
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“Some dude called me who was like, ‘Yeah… we just traded with the Raiders and you’re coming to the Cowboys,'” Jeanty explained on the “Stacking the Box” podcast. “I just hung up, bro. I was like, ‘come on, bro.'”
The prank call Jeanty received might not have been in quite the same category as the attempts to fool fellow draft picks Shedeur Sanders, Abdul Carter, Mason Graham, Tyler Warren and Kyle McCord. Those calls posing as NFL personnel came before those players were officially selected. And there could be even more that haven’t yet been shared or reported.
The call to Sanders was the most infamous because the conversation with someone claiming to be New Orleans Saints general manager Mickey Loomis was recorded by Well Off Media, the social media channel run by Sanders’ older brother, Deion Sanders Jr. The other side of the call was also filmed and briefly posted publicly on social media before the account was made private.
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That particular prank call was outed when the Atlanta Falcons acknowledged that the culprit was the son of defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich. The team was subsequently fined $250,000 by the NFL, while Ulbrich was docked $100,000 for not securely protecting a number that was supposed to be available only to NFL coaches and executives for contacting draft picks.
Cowboys fans would have loved for their team to add an impact running back like Jeanty with their first round pick after losing Rico Dowdle in free agency. But the Raiders made that a moot point by pouncing on the Boise State star and Heisman Trophy runner-up six spots earlier.
The Cowboys went on to select offensive lineman Tyler Booker with their No. 12 selection and finally drafted running back Jaydon Blue in the fifth round.
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