Dak Prescott and the Horrors of the Draft Process

A bad player comparison, a fake DUI charge, and being an odd fit for the NFL all combine to drop Dak Prescott far lower than he should've been selected.

Welcome back to my Sports Passion Project everybody, where I’ve mostly stayed quiet about the NFL Draft over the last few weeks. This is for two reasons. The first is that I was heavily focused on building my optimal playoff team count and QB skill models, which distracted my focus, but the second is that my focus was distracted on purpose, because I didn’t want to either talk or think about the draft, because I find the whole draft process to be nonsense. Not the internal process, but the external media process that all these kids must go through.

It sickens me how everybody thinks they know what’s going to happen for all these young men, at a point in time where they don’t even know what’s going to happen for themselves. Nobody truly knows anything, least of all the media people who insist on talking about it every day for two months every March and April, but they act like they know everything.

In short, the amount of knowledge people possess about the draft tends to be wildly overstated, especially at certain positions. For now, I’m here to talk about the QB position, which tends to be simultaneously vastly oversimplified and needlessly complicated.

For instance, let’s look at the 2024 class. To a data guy like me, the analysis could be simple. To piggyback off my xEPA methodology from last week, Cam Ward had both a wicked completion percentage on a high yards per completion number (college CPOE isn’t measured, but this is likely indicative of a high CPOE), and a ridiculous sack rate of just 4.6% in 2024. He’s the best QB in the class. Then come Jaxson Dart and Shedeur Sanders, who are right on top of each other in terms of accuracy, but Jaxson avoids sacks like a league average college QB, meanwhile Shedeur struggles at that. Dillon Gabriel is slightly less accurate than Shedeur on roughly the same pass depths, but is much better at getting the ball out of his hands, suffering a sack rate of just 4.5%, and Tyler Shough is nothing special at throwing the football, but got sacked just 14 times on 403 drop backs.

You can learn all this just by looking at their numbers. You can also learn that sack avoidance tends to translate less well to the NFL than throwing accuracy does, so when picking a QB, teams should likely prioritise the arm accuracy guys (I’m looking at you, New Orleans!), but what you can never learn is what kind of man that you’re picking alongside the football player.

This brings me to the Shedeur Sanders situation. The football player seems strictly worse than Jaxson Dart, and approximately on the level with Dillon Gabriel, based on the back of the envelope five minute data analysis I’ve done above, but when NFL teams got the chance to speak with Shedeur, they did not like the man that they met with. Regardless of how much they liked the football player, the man was a total turn off, and caused the football player to drop all the way to the 144th pick in the draft.

There has been a lot of negativity going around about Shedeur Sanders in the week since, including all kinds of talk about what kind of person he may or may not be, and how this low draft position is going to affect him. However, we all know that around here, I live to inject some positivity into negative situations, so I’m going to make it perfectly clear to you that this is not the ending of Shedeur Sanders. If he plays his cards right, it will be only the beginning.

Just like it was for Dak Prescott.

It’s fascinating to me that during the whole Shedeur Sanders saga, I seemed to be the only one thinking that I’d read this book before. Shedeur’s draft story is not a carbon copy of Dak Prescott’s draft story, but if this were a literary analysis, I would say it’s very clear that the authors of these two stories had the same influences.

Let me explain.

Dak Prescott was not the son of royalty. His father was not Deion Sanders, but he was born into the game of football as much as anybody. Born and raised in the football hotbed of Southern Louisiana, Dak’s parents divorced when he was very young, so he spent most of his childhood, along with his brother and sister, living with his mother Peggy, a woman who so loved this game that she got a football tattooed on her arm, along with the number three, one for each of her children.

The Prescott family would frequently play games in the backyard. Eventually this evolved into neighbourhood games, and eventually this evolved into Dak being the star QB for the Haughton High School Buccaneers, where he won championships. From here, he went to Mississippi State, where he took that school as high as it has ever been, including being ranked number one in the country for the only time in the history of the school, where they sat for four weeks prior to a very poorly timed loss against Alabama.

Unable to secure a guarantee to get drafted, Dak went back to Mississippi State for a lame duck 2015 season, without a lot of their best players from the year before, but what was a big step back for the team was a major step forward for Dak individually. His throwing accuracy improved immensely, to be the third best amongst all draft eligible QBs, behind only Paxton Lynch (proof that college numbers do not always translate), and Cody Kessler (proof that sometimes college numbers do translate). His sack rate regressed, but like I said, it’s mostly about arm accuracy coming out of college.

Now that all the football had been played, it’s time for the draft processes. All the workouts, all the combine drills, all the interviews, and as we go through all of that, Dak Prescott comes out looking even better. Most of the talk about him is glowing praise for just how ready he is for the mental side of being a QB in the National Football League. Phrases like ‘football IQ,’ ‘natural leader,’ and ‘character’ are bandied about.

There are two QBs slated to go number one and number two overall in the draft, Jared Goff and Carson Wentz, but it’s not a controversial statement to say that Dak Prescott is better than both of them, right now. The concern with Dak, why he’s not being pegged to go first overall, comes in that he was not an exceptional pocket passer in college. That’s not necessarily his fault, as he got very little experience at it playing in Dan Mullen’s offence.

A commonly used player comparison for Dak throughout the draft process is actually Tim Tebow. Not just because they both played in the Dan Mullen offence, but because both are viewed as locker room guys, leadership guys, character guys, who are both an A+ on the mental side of the game, but not quite possessing the physical talents necessary to get it done at the NFL level. Dak’s are better than Tim Tebow’s, notably coming without the broken throwing mechanics, but nobody is wowed by Dak Prescott’s physical skills, even if they are wowed by his mental ones.

This type of player will be better right out of the box than a Jared Goff or a Carson Wentz, just like Tim Tebow was better than number one overall pick Sam Bradford right away, but does not have the potential to grow into a truly great QB, like teams believe Goff and Wentz have. We all know how that will work out for the Rams and Eagles. Jared Goff will play like a truly great QB on another team. Carson Wentz will never play like a truly great QB at any point, but this is indicative of how the draft process works. Teams knowingly pick worse players, even at number one overall, in hopes that they will become something better one day.

Quite simply, the belief is that Dak is close to his ceiling already. He will be valuable as a backup with potential to become the starter in the event that he can hone his physical skills, but when picking QB in the first round, that’s not what you’re looking for. You’re looking for QBs that already have the physical skills, in hopes that your coaches can teach him how to play football mentally.

This is why most mock drafts have a team picking Dak Prescott at the beginning of the third round, or perhaps the end of the second. There are QBs with more perceived potential mocked in front of him, but the sure thing that Dak Prescott represents makes him enticing to teams looking for a solid backup now, as well as a potential starting option in the future, but somebody who likely won’t provide competition to the entrenched starter right away.

This makes Dak Prescott the perfect fit for a team with an aging, but still entrenched, starting QB. That narrows the search to just a few teams with old starters, but also have not drafted to address this exact need already. The Patriots drafted Jimmy Garoppolo for just this purpose in 2014, so it won’t be them. The New York Giants have already done the same thing to fill the post behind Eli Manning, and etcetera.

Continuously eliminating all teams in this fashion leaves Dak with three preferable options.

Carson Palmer was the NFL’s best QB in 2015, but he’s 37 years old now, and will not be playing for much longer. That means the Arizona Cardinals are absolutely a possible Dak Prescott destination, as are the San Diego Chargers, who have a 34 year old Philip Rivers who is still going strong, and will be for many years, but that gives time to groom a player like Dak Prescott into the QB you want him to be. He would be a great fit for both these teams. However, these two are just window dressing, because everybody knows which team really wants Dak Prescott.

The Dallas Cowboys.

Tony Romo is a great and underrated player, but he’s coming off a collarbone injury that limited him to just four starts in 2015, and at 36 years old, he’s not getting any younger. There is no desire to replace Tony outright, but there is desire to get a solid backup QB in place, that can wins games while he’s out, just in case. You never know when a season ending arm injury may flare up again. In conjunction with this, there’s also the desire to get his future replacement in place, so Dallas is not left in the lurch once Tony’s final injury, which we all know is coming, actually arrives.

Normally, fulfilling both desires would require keeping three QBs on the roster. One veteran backup, and one young QB being groomed into the future starter, but Dak Prescott is like a QB prospect sent from God to fill both roles at once. His combination of solid pro readiness, great locker room presence, and perceived willingness to wait it out makes him perfect for being both a solid backup right away, and a potential starter for the future. Dallas would be killing two stones with one bird. You cannot imagine a more perfect fit.

This has been forgotten, given the events that I’m about to explain, but Dak Prescott was the Dallas Cowboys’ guy. He was the one the fit their roster. He was the one they wanted right from the beginning. As such, every mock draft at this stage has Dak Prescott going to Dallas in some form or fashion. Most think the Cowboys can get him with their pick in the third round, 67th overall, but others project Dallas having to trade into the end of the second round to get him.

Regardless, Dallas likes Dak Prescott, and everybody knows it. There are only a few teams that need or want a player of this specific archetype, and Dallas picks earlier in the draft than all of them, so in all likelihood, they will get their guy, unless the Cardinals pick him with the 61st pick in the second round, but that is exceedingly unlikely, given that Arizona made the NFC Championship game last year, and is likely going to be looking for more immediate help than Dak can provide.

At this point, I must comment on just how good of a position this is for Dak. Most players who are not going to be picked in the top five have absolutely no idea where they’re going to be spending the first four years of their pro career, and especially not fringe second round guys like Dak Prescott, but with everybody in the world, including the Dallas Cowboys (who do not work to hide their interest), convinced that he’s going to the Dallas Cowboys with pick 67, he’s got to be feeling pretty good about things.

As a QB, there are very few better feelings than being wanted by the Dallas Cowboys, because the Cowboys know what they’re looking at. Whatever else you may say about this franchise, Dallas knows how to find QBs. That cannot be debated. In terms of straight up xEPA/Play from 1970-2024, the Dallas Cowboys’ 0.109 makes them the second best quarterbacked NFL team since the NFL-AFL merger. From Roger Staubach to Danny White to Troy Aikman to Tony Romo, the Cowboys find good QB play. No matter what. As of the 2016 offseason, they’ve basically never been without a top ten QB on their roster since the NFL-AFL merger, and this is the team that believes they can groom you into their starter one day, just like they groomed Roger Staubach and Danny White and Tony Romo, behind veteran starters. They know what they’re doing.

Sign me up for that situation.

I cannot tell you what Dak was feeling in the days where him going 67 to the Cowboys was common knowledge, but I can tell you that if I were Dak Prescott, I would be turning cartwheels. Some teams just know how to develop QBs better than others, and Dallas is one of the very best. If I were a third round draft pick QB, with no realistic prospect of starting right away anyways, Dallas would be near (or at) the top of my list of desired destinations.

Then, it happens.

Dak’s DUI arrest.

This changes everything.

It threatens to ruin everything Dak has spent the whole draft process, and in truth, his whole life building up. Remember, Dak’s main positive is that he’s a character guy. A man built to lead a team one day, but would you want him to lead your team into doing this? Getting arrested for driving drunk down the streets of Starkville, Mississippi? Drunk driving is a commonly recurring type of crime. People do not just do it one time, so how many times has he done this before?

This line of thought is the kind of impact that just one incident can have. Now, when teams are on the clock, thinking about Dak Prescott, they’re not thinking about all the positive things I’ve told you. They’re thinking about this. Do they want this in their locker room?

Literally yesterday, Dak Prescott the man was thought of as an exemplary locker room figure. The man was never an issue. The only doubts were about the football player. Today, teams are not so sure about either one of the Dak Prescotts. There’s just one problem with this.

Dak Prescott never drove drunk at all.

This next paragraph needs to come out extremely carefully, because drunk driving is an extremely serious offence. It kills more humans than any hard drug out there. I’ve lost loved ones to drunk drivers. I’m sure you have too, or at least know somebody that has. I need you to know I understand full well how dangerous and serious a drunk driving incident is, as I tell you that what Dak Prescott did was just not that bad. He got pulled over for driving 41 mph in a 25 zone, and on the side of the road, blew a blood alcohol level that was marginal on the legal limit.

Marginal is the key word.

This was not a boozed up college kid insisting that he was going to drive home, irrespective of who he may hurt along the way. This was a man who quit drinking after one or two, knowing that he had to drive, thinking he was doing the right thing. He probably didn’t feel drunk at all, but ended up being near enough to the legal alcohol limit to cause a stir.

It was never proven that he was ever over the limit to begin with, as breathalyzers have a margin of error, a margin that Dak was inside of. He was made to blow a second time to try to rectify this issue, and was within the confidence interval again. Therefore, he was not even conclusively over the legal alcohol limit. It’s entirely possible that he did do the right thing after all.

Nevertheless, Dak profusely apologised, and (in both 2016 and 2025) swears up and down that this was a one time mistake that will never happen again. In the end, he does get off on the DUI charge, based on the evidence I told you above, so as far as the law is concerned, he’s a 22 year old kid who got a speeding ticket.

In the real world, big whoop. 22 year old kids get speeding tickets all the time. Nobody cares, but as we always say on this publication, the NFL is not the real world. This speeding ticket/almost but not quite DUI incident hurts Dak badly in the draft process. It changes his projection from 2nd-3rd round to 3rd-4th, and that’s if he can find a team that believes his version of what happened.

For what it’s worth, I believe Dak Prescott’s version of what happened, because like I said, drunk driving is a crime that people often commit more than once, and Dak has never repeated, but when we get to draft night, it becomes clear that he’s been hurt badly by this.

Dak was never going to be picked in the first round, but his problems begin there, when Dallas tries their damnedest to trade up to get QB Paxton Lynch. They’re beaten to the punch by the Denver Broncos, who are willing to offer a slightly sweeter deal, but for a team in Dallas and player in Dak Prescott that seemed so satisfied with each other before the DUI headline, this is evidence that Dallas is trying to renege on their end of the bargain. They’re not as interested as they once were. They do not get Paxton Lynch, which still leaves the Dak door open, but the fact that they tried tells all.

The trouble gets even more obvious on day two, when the pick that’s been slotted to be the Dak Prescott pick ever since the draft process got started, number 67 to the Cowboys, is instead used on DT Maliek Collins. To be fair, this is a great pick for Dallas. Maliek will be a four year starter there, but for Dak Prescott this is a total disaster.

As day two goes along, Dak falls out of the third round altogether. The Chargers get a chance, and do not select him. The Cardinals get a chance, and do not select him. The Cleveland Browns elect to take QB Cody Kessler (a man many thought would not be drafted at all) over him. This was a great pick too by the way. I’ve written an article on Cody Kessler if you’d like to know how that turned out.

Okay. This could’ve been predicted. A projected third rounder with a DUI charge against him (that will not be dropped until July) is no longer a projected third rounder, but what comes next could never have been predicted. At this point, I must detail the machinations around the 100th overall pick.

Nobody knows it yet, but these machinations over the 100th overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft are very quickly going to prove to be one of the most important moments of the new millennium for the Dallas Cowboys.

Dallas is set to go on the clock with the third pick of the fourth round, number 101 overall. Everybody knows they plan to take a QB, and everybody knows what QB they plan to take. Dak has fallen so far down the draft board that the Cowboys now have their hearts set on Connor Cook. However, it is not their pick yet. The Cleveland Browns are currently on the clock with pick number 100, and are deep into their ‘trade back and accrue every draft pick in the fifth round’ experiment that they were doing for a few years there. Everybody knows that any team wanting Connor Cook must speak now, or forever watch him in a Dallas Cowboy uniform, and everybody (including Dallas) knows that Cleveland is a willing trade partner.

As such, the Cowboys get into a second bidding war trying to trade up for a QB. In the end, the Oakland Raiders end up offering a fifth round draft pick to move up into this spot, which is absurd value for a trade up in the fourth round, and the Cowboys know it. They cannot justify giving up a fifth to move up just one spot in the fourth round, so in what turns out to be a very fortuitous turn of events for Dallas, the likes of which can only happen to the Cowboys, Oakland’s absurd overpay means they get QB Connor Cook, selecting him 100th overall, and Dallas has to keep QB searching.

It’s not going to be with pick 101 though.

With that pick, Dallas selects a defensive lineman with a degenerative back condition instead of Dak Prescott, and our man keeps falling and falling. A few teams look, but none bite, and at this point it becomes very clear that there is another suitor.

Now that we’ve gotten past the first 100 picks, the Buffalo Bills are seriously considering taking QB with their next pick, and there is only one QB prospect remaining that’s realistic value for a fourth round pick. If the Buffalo Bills had been in possession of a pick in this round, I believe that’s where Dak Prescott would’ve gone, and who knows how history changes with Dak in Buffalo, but thankfully, the Bills had already used up their fourth round pick, trading up earlier in the day.

Therefore, we get all the way into the compensatory draft picks at the end of the fourth round, where once again the Dallas Cowboys are on the clock, with pick number 135, and this time, they must actually make their Dak Prescott decision.

All the other times they’ve passed on Dak, they did so with the likely knowledge that all the other teams would pass as well, but this time, Buffalo is sitting right there at pick 139, and will select Dak Prescott if he is available. Compensatory draft picks at this time are not tradeable, so there’s no possibility of trading back up ahead of Buffalo.

It’s now, or never, and with the 37th pick of the fourth round of the 2016 NFL Draft, number 135 overall, the Dallas Cowboys make the decision to kill two stones with one bird after all.

They select Dak Prescott.

For an outcome that everybody knew was going to happen several months ago, we had to go all the way around the world to get to this point. The Cowboys were clearly scared off by the DUI concerns, as after making little effort to feign disinterest in Dak with pick 67 beforehand, they desperately tried to get either Paxton Lynch or Connor Cook afterwards.

It is also true that when it came down to making the final decision of either selecting Dak, or allowing him to go to Buffalo, the Cowboys just couldn’t allow their guy to slip through their fingers, but only because they couldn’t afford to pay for their two top choices did they end up with Dak Prescott, and this can’t have felt good for the young man.

Much like everybody is saying about Shedeur Sanders currently, the outcome is the same. Dak leaves the draft as a member of the Dallas Cowboys. In theory, nobody cares whether it’s pick 67 or pick 135. The mission from here onwards is the same, regardless of whether Dak got picked in the beginning of the third round, or in the compensatory picks after the end of the fourth. That mission is to be the bird that kills both stones. Be a solid backup now, and work towards being a solid starter later. With the slide in draft position, that mission has not changed, but the vibes are different now.

It would’ve been very easy for Dak Prescott to allow himself to feel like a first choice before the fake DUI incident. Yes, if the Cowboys could’ve got Jared Goff or Carson Wentz, they would have. Nobody is kidding themselves there, but Dak really was the perfect player for this QB room, and the Cowboys seemed to be in lock step on that. They didn’t want Connor Cook. They didn’t want Christian Hackenberg. They wanted him, and while 34th overall in the second round was too early, the plan to pick him at 67 overall in the third seemed like a perfect one for all parties.

Instead, after the fake DUI happened, Dak had to hear about the Cowboys trying to trade up to select other QBs not once but twice. He had to hear the Cowboys say names that were not his, in the spots he should’ve been picked in, in two consecutive rounds, and he had to sweat whether he was going to end up in Dallas at all, after seemingly being a lock to end up there throughout the whole process, with the Bills just waiting for him to fall to them, eagerly wanting Dak Prescott in Buffalo once he dropped to fourth round value.

Alas, he did not fall to Buffalo. Once Dallas had to actually make their final choice on him, they could not peel themselves away from the man they had wanted to begin with. This is a small comfort, but not as much comfort as would have come without all of the mess that happened in the middle.

This is the beginning of the unusual, do they or do they not want me relationship that Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys have always had with each other. The nature of the relationship between the two sides that began on draft night persists all the way into 2025, and once the draft ended, and 2016 training camp began, it only strengthened.

This draft slide also changes training camp dynamics. A QB drafted at the top of the third round in the modern NFL is virtually assured to be the backup, but a QB drafted between the fourth and the fifth round has no such assurances, and by all accounts, Dak struggles in camp. He is a rookie. Struggles will happen, but it’s tough to struggle given the circumstances.

Perhaps a training camp performance like this makes some wish they’d coughed up a fifth for Connor Cook after all.

All of this comes to a head when backup QB Kellen Moore breaks his ankle in the first few days of camp. This moves Dak up the depth chart to number two, and the Cowboys do not like that at all. Not with how he’s been playing in practice, so they immediately get to working the phones, in an effort to find a better QB2. At first they try Nick Foles, but he’s not willing to come into a battle for the backup job. That’s fine, because the prize that Dallas truly wants is Josh McCown.

You guys all know by now. We love Josh McCown around here. He posted a 0.7 CPOE on a 90 sk%+ last year, for 0.087 EPA/Play, on the horrendous 2015 Cleveland Browns, while constantly under pressure due to the team wanting to start Johnny Manziel instead. On such an awful roster, in such bad circumstances, those are very good numbers. Even when their name is Josh McCown, 0.087 EPA/Play QBs are not easy to trade for. Cleveland says they want a fourth round pick, that can turn into a third depending upon how Josh plays. Dallas says this is too steep, but are willing to trade a late round pick for him.

Cleveland mull over this for a couple days, and ultimately come back with a no. They will not be trading Josh McCown for that price, and Dallas does not up their offer. No trade occurs, and this is yet another example of the stop-start, want-don’t want relationship that the Dallas Cowboys have with Dak Prescott.

Think about this from his perspective. Counting the two trade up attempts at the draft, this is the third time the Cowboys have tried to have somebody other than Dak as their QB2, but also the third time they’ve balked at the price. It’s both indicative of a like and a dislike towards Dak. The team has tried to replace him three times, which can’t feel nice for the young man, but they are not willing to do irrational things to replace him, which must feel at least a little bit reassuring.

For an example of the opposite, the Cleveland Browns’ QB for 2022 was set to be Jacoby Brissett, but they believed in him so little that they were willing to do anything to replace him, and ended up trading three first round picks for Deshaun Watson. That’s what desperation looks like. On the opposite extreme, there is CJ Stroud, whom the Texans evidently believe in so much that they haven’t even made inquiries about any of the better QBs out there, even as some have come available. They believe in their guy, and are not looking to replace him.

It’s clear that the Cowboys do not feel either of these ways about Dak Prescott. If they were desperate for a better backup, they would’ve caved and traded a fourth round pick for Josh McCown, but they didn’t. If they were absolutely sure that Dak Prescott could be a QB2 in the NFL right now, they wouldn’t have called about Josh McCown or Nick Foles, but they did.

Like most NFL players, Dak sits in the middle of this extreme somewhere.

This is odd, but it only feels that way because of the position he plays. For most players, this constant flux of the team not being desperate to replace you, but always looking for your replacement, is the normal state of things. For QBs though, it’s a different story. Normally, as a QB, you are on one of the extremes. Either your team is completely satisfied with the QB situation, or they are trying desperately to change it, but neither apply in this case. Dak Prescott’s odd combination of traits coming into the league puts the Cowboys into the odd position of having normalcy in their QB room, a place where normal is not normal.

The Cowboys can, in essence, treat Dak Prescott as if he’s a linebacker. He doesn’t need the kid gloves that most rookie QBs do, and he’s also too good to desperately require replacement. All of this coalesces into the Cowboys not making any offseason acquisitions. Their QB room stays as it is. Kellen Moore has broken his ankle, so the battle for the QB2 job compresses from a three-way battle to a two-way battle, between Dak Prescott and Jameill Showers.

This is not a battle that’s on equal terms. We must acknowledge that all the pressure is going one way. If Jameill Showers (undrafted) loses this QB battle, he will likely not make the 53 man roster. Dak Prescott is going to stay no matter what, unless he royally screws it up, because he was still a fourth round draft pick. Roster builders are generally too vain to cut somebody they’ve just drafted so highly, unless they are extremely bad.

Jameill Showers is fighting for his NFL life. Dak is just fighting for a depth chart spot, and for most of the offseason, it looks like it. Jameill is the better guy a lot of the time. What Dak generally struggles with is what everybody expected him to struggle with, passing in the pocket, without his feet moving. When he can escape the pocket, he often looks just as he did at Mississippi State, although he often struggles to get the ball out quickly enough.

These are not necessarily massive issues. They’re common rookie struggles. They only become massive issues once the preseason begins, where the Tony Romo injury, the one that Dak Prescott was brought in to be a bulwark against, happens already. In the third preseason game, against the Seattle Seahawks, Tony Romo goes down with a back injury, one that’s going to keep him out for half the season, if not longer.

When this exact same thing happened last season, it caused one of the best teams in football to win just four games. Elite roster cores don’t last forever. Dallas can’t keep doing this every year.

With his play once he actually got on the field at game speed, there was no longer any doubt. Jameill Showers cannot start over Dak Prescott, but nobody thought Dak would be starting at all. Taking over for the injured Tony Romo is the job that he was drafted to do, but nobody thought he’d have to take over for half a season, and nobody thought that would be the first half of the season.

This brings us back once again to the relationship between player and team. Dallas has tried everything to not be forced to put Dak Prescott in this position. They tried to trade for Paxton Lynch or Connor Cook, so they could be the ones in this position. They tried to sign Nick Foles, so he could be the one in this position. They tried to trade for Josh McCown, so he could be the one in this position.

In the end though, in a fashion that will become quite typical in the years ahead, the Dallas Cowboys have done the right thing by Dak Prescott every step of the way, in spite of how hard they’ve tried not to do so. Looking at things in terms of outcomes, they selected him in the draft, just like they said they would. They brought him in to be the solid backup behind Tony Romo, and didn’t trade for any veterans to replace him, just like they said they would, and now, with a debilitating back injury to Tony Romo, they are starting Dak Prescott, just like they said they would.

This is a really backwards way to keep your word to the man you’ve drafted, but the Cowboys have done just that. However, in doing so, they have put themselves in a terrible position. Being forced to start a rookie QB at all is bad enough, and this is even worse. Dallas is not just being forced to start any rookie. They’re being forced to start the eighth QB off the board, 135th overall pick Dak Prescott.

Generally, starting rookie QBs goes extremely badly to begin with, but this gets dramatically worse when considering only ones drafted in the fourth round or later. As of 2016, the most recent QB selected in the fourth round or later to get to at least 180 touches in his rookie season is Ryan Lindley in 2012, who posted 196 touches of -0.446 EPA/Play, the worst QB season on record in that particular statistic. If we take that as an outlier, we can go back to 2006 Bruce Gradkowski, who posted 407 plays of -0.235 EPA/Play football. That’s horrendous, but quite typical of the result that happens when a team tries to play a fourth round draft pick QB in their rookie season.

However, Dak Prescott is not a true fourth round talent. He was always seen as a late second or early third round guy, and out of that group of players, there are some recent successes. They don’t come from 2015 or 2014, but Mike Glennon did okay in putting up -0.042 EPA/Play in 2013. By rookie standards, that is acceptable, and if we go just one instance further back, there is Russell Wilson’s 0.213 EPA/Play in 2012, so you can absolutely be a good rookie QB coming out of this part of the draft.

The whole appeal of drafting Dak Prescott was that he was ready, and he was forecasted to be good right out of the gate. Now, the Dallas Cowboys have put themselves in a position to have to test that theory. They wavered, but in the end they did not trade for Paxton Lynch. They did not trade for Connor Cook. They did not sign Nick Foles, and they did not trade for Josh McCown.

They did it reluctantly, but in the end, they did put Dak Prescott into the position of being undisputed QB2, and now that long time starter Tony Romo is injured for at least half the season, that’s become QB1.

At last, ‘they’ is going to become ‘we,’ because Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys have just become indistinguishable.

Stay tuned for part two of this two-part Dak Prescott miniseries, which is going to talk about the football that happens in the aftermath of this whirlwind of a process that results in him becoming QB1 in Dallas, but to go back to Shedeur Sanders for just a second, this is the positive angle of what happened to him.

The Browns have four QBs on the roster right now, but if one of the four QBs gets injured, and another gets beat in a competition by Shedeur, at that point he only needs to leapfrog one guy to get into position to be the QB1. This sounds like a lot of necessary events, but look at Dak Prescott. It didn’t even take until the fourth preseason game for it to all come together for him.

If Shedeur Sanders gets his nose to the grindstone, working hard and playing well despite a state of flux that he’s sure not to be used to, and is a great guy in the locker room, just like Dak Prescott did, I have all the confidence in the world that he can overcome his draft day slide.

Just like Dak Prescott is about to do.

Stay tuned for part two.

Thanks so much for reading.