“The hype,” he said, “is everywhere. It’s kind of hard to hide from it.”

It’s possible that Elliott, the 20-year-old Cowboys running back, is the most hyped player — particularly at his position — in the past decade. Not long after Dallas made Elliott the No. 4 overall pick in this year’s draft, either boldly or stubbornly defying a recent cultural shift away from selecting rushers in the top 10, he was compared most often with former MVP Adrian Peterson, an almost certain future Hall of Famer. Months before Elliott lines up for his first professional snap, the analytics website Pro Football Focus declared him a “near-lock” to be the 2016 rookie of the year.

Even Gary Brown, Dallas’s running backs coach, couldn’t help himself recently. After describing how the team’s first priority with Elliott is insulating him from unrealistic expectations and unfair pressure, Brown called his newest rusher the most complete rookie back he has ever seen.

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“Clearly he’s that. Clearly,” said Brown, himself a former NFL running back. “Run, catch, block — he does it all.”

To be sure, Elliott was dazzling in two seasons as Ohio State’s starter: more than 1,800 rushing yards both years, anchoring a national championship roster as a sophomore, and emerging as perhaps the best, most willing college blocker since Miami’s Frank Gore.

Gore, it should be pointed out, was a third-round pick in 2005 — a future five-time Pro Bowl selection chosen in the draft’s middle rounds by San Francisco. So, three years later, was Kansas City’s Jamaal Charles, and in 2011 former Cowboys rusher DeMarco Murray. After a few years of such overachievers — and of top choices like Darren McFadden and Trent Richardson falling somewhere between labels of “disappointing” and “prodigious bust” — NFL front offices began treating running back as the most unpredictable, potentially volatile position in the draft.

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Bill Belichick, after all, was going to Super Bowls with Stevan Ridley (a third-round pick in 2011) and Jonas Gray (undrafted in 2012); NFL executives and coaches were getting fired after gambling on the likes of Ronnie Brown (second overall in 2005) and Richardson (No. 3 in 2012). It didn’t help that rushers have, at an average of about 2 1/2 seasons, some of the briefest careers, and anyway, after a while teams and executives just learned to avoid staking their futures on running backs.

“The culture of the league,” said Stephen Jones, the Cowboys’ player personnel director, “has really turned toward being cautious toward taking running backs. They don’t have a long shelf life.”

From restraint to a roll of the dice

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Jones, his boss and father Jerry Jones, and Dallas Coach Jason Garrett made an interesting decision a little more than a year ago. A few months after Murray led the NFL with 1,845 rushing yards, they opted to allow Murray to leave in free agency.

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The Cowboys had, after years of taking chances to acquire high-profile skill position players — trading three draft picks for wideout Roy Williams in 2008 a few months after selecting running back Felix Jones out of Arkansas (Jerry Jones’s alma mater) in the first round — seemed in 2010 to settle, finally, into a period of discipline and stability.

Dallas stopped trading away high picks and instead used them to bolster the team’s foundation: offensive tackle Tyron Smith in 2011, center Travis Frederick in ’13 and guard Zack Martin two years ago; all three have been named to Pro Bowls, and the Cowboys possess arguably the NFL’s best offensive line. Tony Romo, when healthy, is one of the league’s best quarterbacks. Garrett, beginning his seventh season, is the longest-tenured Dallas coach since Tom Landry.

League insiders have praised Stephen Jones and Garrett for keeping Jerry Jones’s impulse buys mostly in check. They’ve been effective, even though it has sometimes been uncomfortable, such as when the elder Jones was overruled two years ago on drafting Johnny Manziel, or when he prevailed internally last year in signing the troubled pass-rusher Greg Hardy.

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The Cowboys, riding that offensive line, Murray and Romo, went 12-4 in 2014 and had the league’s seventh-best attack. Then came the decision about Murray, who had approached an NFL single-season record with 392 rushing attempts. Modern thinking triumphed: The only thing riskier than drafting a top-10 running back was signing a well-used rusher to a big second contract.

Unpopular as it was in the Metroplex, the Cowboys had made a wise move: Murray, who signed a $25 million deal with Philadelphia, tallied his worst NFL season and has since been traded to Tennessee.

“We know what happens as they get older,” Stephen Jones said recently.

A turning point

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Cowboys decision-makers traveled to Columbus, Ohio, a few months ago, with another decision bearing down on them. Romo had missed a dozen games in 2015 with a broken collarbone, and Dallas went 4-12 and finished last in the NFL’s worst division, the NFC East.

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The ordeal had also handed the team the No. 4 overall pick.

Evaluators had assembled the first iteration of their draft board, but now they were stuck: If Dallas remained at No. 4, should the pick be Florida State cornerback Jalen Ramsey or Elliott? Common sense pointed at Ramsey, an all-American who had shut down some of college football’s best receivers, and after so much emphasis recently on offense, Dallas badly needed defensive upgrades. Stephen Jones said there wasn’t a pass-rusher with skills befitting the fourth overall choice. So with the draft approaching, the Cowboys went to central Ohio.

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They met with Elliott’s parents and his Buckeyes coaches. They watched video of a rusher who, only a few months ago, neither captivated the nation, as did LSU’s Leonard Fournette, nor won the Heisman Trophy, as did Alabama’s Derrick Henry. (Elliott finished a distant eighth, behind four other running backs, in voting.)

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Elliott, though, had made an impression on NFL evaluators during the scouting combine: a rare mix of size (6 feet, 225 pounds), speed (4.47-second 40-yard dash) and versatility. Cowboys scouts noticed how, after the Buckeyes lost to Virginia Tech early in the 2014 season, Elliott responded with his best two games to that point and repositioned the Buckeyes for a national title run. They saw his willingness to block, hearing Buckeyes Coach Urban Meyer go on about Elliott’s selflessness: the time he drilled an opponent as a freshman playing special teams, how in 2015 he surrendered zero sacks, how his second-level protection ability was “legendary,” as Meyer would later put it.

“What separates him,” the Ohio State coach said in an interview, “is that relentless pursuit of finishing plays.”

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The Cowboys liked that. The idea of another franchise rusher, nearly 14 years after Emmitt Smith’s final carry for Dallas, wasn’t bad either. But sitting in Columbus, Dallas evaluators saw Elliott and thought of Romo — the 36-year-old passer whose 2015 injury dismantled the Cowboys’ season and whose health and advancing age represent a fault line streaking through Dallas’s chances of reaching the NFC championship game for the first time in two decades.

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Elliott was a promising rusher and skilled receiver, but if he had the added potential to extend one of Romo’s seasons or perhaps his career, he might therefore hold the power, in theory, to alter the direction of the entire franchise.

By the time the Cowboys’ jet was back in the air, the decision was made: Recent NFL culture, immediate roster needs and a stretch of franchise discipline be damned, Dallas was using that No. 4 pick on a running back.

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Adapting under pressure

Late in Elliott’s fifth practice as an NFL player, so much potential and attention surrounding him, he split out wide and, after Romo dropped back, Elliott slipped and fell.

On another play, he seemed confused by his responsibilities, retreating to the huddle before being replaced.

“Every day in practice,” Elliott said, “you have those rookie moments.”

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Elliott said he gets lost driving around his new city sometimes, and finding an apartment and a doctor have been unexpected challenges for a young man who won’t turn 21 until late next month. The Cowboys’ playbook, teammate Alfred Morris said, is daunting already and expanding, it seems, by the day. Elliott said he spends hours each evening trying to keep up with an offense that, soon enough, will include Romo’s pre-snap reads and adjustments and improvisations. Learning a kind of new language isn’t enough of a load on Elliott; he’ll also be expected to break records, win awards and anchor a deep playoff run — the only way to justify that draft slot.

“There’s already enough pressure,” said Morris, the former Washington running back whose locker neighbors that of Elliott. “If you’re not perfect, then you’re not going to make it. You always drive yourself crazy as is, and to add extra helpings of stress on top of that, that’s not good for you.”

Brown, the running backs coach, said the Cowboys have tried to simplify Elliott’s responsibilities with baby steps: adapt to the NFL game’s speed, compete for the starting running back job, stay upbeat as the vise tightens. Meyer said he planned to speak with Elliott about managing stress.

Elliott said he likes the attention. It’s part of the job. But that too can be a familiar refrain for rookies. It’s rare, though, that rookies deal with what Elliott will face in the coming months, to say nothing about the possibility of an injury, a disappointing game, a season that almost cannot possibly match the hype that has elevated Elliott. “Nobody’s expectations,” he said, “are going to be more than mine.”