Green Bay Packers: 3 recent Draft booms and busts
By Kenny Jilek
Datone Jones
Datone Jones was part of the Packers plan a few years ago to get an edge-rusher opposite Clay Matthews that could get to the quarterback and take some pressure off of Clay to make all the plays for the defense. They took him in the first round the year after using their first-round choice on Nick Perry in 2012. Neither of these picks worked out extremely well, but Perry misses the cutoff for this list and has had some good contributing years with the team.
Playmaking is expected from a first-round pick and Jones failed to do that in his four years with the Green Bay Packers. He had a total of nine sacks in four years. That is just over two sacks per year. That’s not very good. In his career, he has the exact same number of forced fumbles as the Vikings’ Kenny Clark. When a defensive first-rounder has the same number of anything as a kick returner who played one game, that’s a problem. Funny enough, he has returned a kick in the NFL for a spectacular nine yards.
When he became a free agent after the 2016 season, the Packers’ front office decided against bringing him back. He has been trying and failing, to latch on and get consistent playing time ever since then. He has one sack in the past two years since leaving Green Bay. In 2018 he only played one game for the Dallas Cowboys and did not record any statistics.
Like many draft busts, he has had injury issues. He was placed on the Cowboys’ Injured Reserve List with a hamstring injury in 2018. The difference between this injury and Khyri Thornton’s was that Thornton’s was his rookie season and stunted his development, while Jones had five seasons to prove himself before getting injured. You never know exactly what will happen with a guy. Jones could come back from it in 2019 and have an extremely productive 2019 and make me eat my words, but I’ll wait to see it before I believe it.