Dak Prescott: The Greatest Rookie QB of All Time

Dak Prescott took centre stage in 2016, doing things that no rookie QB had ever done before.

Welcome back to my Sports Passion Project everybody, where last week I talked very little about actual football. It was nice to throw a curveball instead of my fastball for once, but this week, we need to talk about the actual football that makes 2016 Dak Prescott notable.

This is part two of my Dak Prescott miniseries, so be sure to check out part one, where I talk about his miserable experience with the draft process, how he fell from an early third round pick to being selected number 135th overall, why this number was never indicative of his true talents, and conclude with the chain of events that leads to the 135th overall draft pick starting in week one for what looks to be one of the best rosters in the NFL.

Dak Prescott and the Horrors of the Draft Process

It’s a testament to the quality of this Dallas roster that the preseason over/under for this team is 8.5, despite the fact that Tony Romo is out for the first eight to ten weeks of the season. That means the QB who’s generated 0.214 EPA/Play over his last 1000 plays will be back eventually, but for now, we’re stuck with the 135th overall draft pick. He’s not really a 135th overall draft pick calibre QB, as Dak should’ve gone much earlier, and would’ve gone earlier without a trumped up DUI in the headlines, but most fans don’t pay that close attention. They just see that we’ve got a guy drafted really late starting for us, which is virtually always followed by total disaster.

However, the main thing that’s been said about Dak Prescott, through the draft process and through the offseason, is that he’s the rookie QB in this class that’s going to be the very most ready to play right away. Jared Goff did go first overall, and Carson Wentz did go second, but it’s an open secret that both of these guys were potential picks. Projects, if you will. It’s not controversial, even contemporaneously, to say that Dak is going to be better than them this year.

The doubts are over how much potential for growth he has as a pro, but most are in agreement that if you had to draft a QB out of the 2016 draft exclusively for how they’re going to perform as rookies, we’ve got the guy. That’s the good news.

More good news is that the QB situation can’t get any worse than it was last year. Last season, in 2015, the Cowboys came into the year completely unprepared to handle any kind of Tony Romo injury. Tony hadn’t missed a start (other than rest) since 2010. Durability was not an issue. As such, we did not have our backup QB situation sorted, and as a result, the 2015 Cowboys started four different QBs throughout the year, every one of whom except for Tony Romo was absolutely horrendous, as this team slumped to the second worst passing offence in the league, and that’s including the four solid Tony Romo starts.

This caused one of the best rosters in the NFL to slump to an embarrassing 4-12 record. The fear caused by this miserable 2015 backup QB situation is what led the Cowboys to select Dak Prescott in the first place. That alone would make the embarrassment that was last season a blessing in disguise, but it goes even deeper than that.

The NFL is not designed to have what was already one of its best rosters also end up with the fourth worst record in the league, and therefore the fourth highest draft pick. This was a roster with very few needs, other than QB, and Tony Romo was supposed to be coming back for 2016. This left the team perfectly positioned to select a luxury good, RB Ezekiel Elliott, with the fourth overall draft pick.

Zeke is the big name here, but the team also managed to snag solid starters Maliek Collins, Jaylon Smith, and Anthony Brown, in addition to shoring up our backup QB situation by selecting Dak Prescott. All of these additions make us the likely favourites to win a very weak NFC going into 2016, but all that is before we get the bad news.

Tony Romo is out for eight to ten weeks, with some broken bones in his back. Back injuries are not to be messed with, so there will be no early comebacks. He will be out for every one of those eight to ten weeks, and you can feel the deflation in the fanbase.

Even if Dak Prescott is the very most pro-ready QB coming out of this 2016 draft, it’s still impossible for him to play as well as Tony Romo would have, because no rookie in NFL history has ever played as well as Tony would have. We must remember that Cowboy fans and media are thinking back on a 0.329 EPA/Play season in 2014 out of Tony, and this is the type of QB play they were expecting to get back.

Even if we modestly round down and say expectations were around 0.250 somewhere, no rookie QB has ever gotten to that number. That includes all rookies, even the first and second overall guys, and Dak, even without the trumped up DUI charge, is far from a first or second overall guy.

It’s hard to look at this as anything but an extreme downgrade at the QB position, and we’ve already seen last year what an extreme downgrade at the QB position can do to this team. Nobody expects Dak to be as bad as the Matt Cassel, Brandon Weeden, Kellen Moore trifecta from last season, but positive EPA out of him would likely be exceeding expectations. Fast forwarding to 2023, we find a good comparison in Aidan O’Connell, drafted roughly in the same position as Dak was. He generated -0.038 EPA/Play in solid playing time in his rookie season, which didn’t exactly get anybody buzzing, but wasn’t a disappointment either. That’s a good barometer on where expectations for Dak Prescott are.

Dak’s are likely slightly higher than this, due to the much higher quality of offence around him, but to expect anything better than 0 EPA would likely be verging on unreasonable. The hope is that if Tony is out for the full ten weeks, and Dak has to play the first nine games, he can at least win three or four of them to keep the season alive, waiting for Tony to come back and win five out of the final seven, which would get us to that over/under mark of 8.5, and hopefully get us to the playoffs in an NFC that does not look to be very strong.

This is the narrative that fans and media are expecting for the 2016 Dallas Cowboys, and in week one at home against the Giants, very little is done to disprove the idea that’s the way things are going to go.

Dak plays okay in week one, not embarrassing himself even as Ezekiel Elliott’s NFL career gets off to an extremely slow start, operating at a 24 percent success rate in this game. Nevertheless, we do score five times on our nine possessions, meanwhile the Giants are only able to score three times on their nine, but while we’re held twice inside the ten yard line to a FG, all of the Giant scores are touchdowns, and that’s what sinks us, as we lose 20-19 to fall to 0-1 on the season.

As a team desperately needing every win we can get, this is the kind of game we really need to bring home as a W. We really couldn’t afford to screw this one up, but with a rookie QB, things like this will happen. It’s not Dak Prescott’s fault that this team really cannot afford it. He can’t choose the situation he got dropped into. There’s a reason that rookie QBs typically don’t start for championship contenders.

We were better than the Giants today, but football is not about being the better team. It’s about winning, and we were beaten by the Giants today. Dak had two chances to turn FGs into TDs in the red zone, and failed. He had two tries at the two minute drill at the end of the game, and failed, but despite all that, I would be lying if I said I’m disappointed in his performance.

Against a New York Giants team that’s going to finish the year with the third best pass defence in terms of EPA/Play allowed, and second best in terms of success rate allowed, Dak went out there in his first career NFL action and put up 0.06 EPA/Play on them. 0.06 EPA/Play is not going to light the world on fire, especially in a loss, but for fans that’d become accustomed to watching Matt Cassel losing us games we should’ve won, it feels nice to at least be close, even if there’s tacit acknowledgement in the back of everybody’s mind that Tony Romo would’ve won this game.

0-1 is not a death sentence, but things ramp up fast in the NFL, so we move onto week two, for a game that’s already far more important than a rookie’s second career start should ever be. We’re going on the road to face the Washington Redskins, in an important divisional matchup in the NFC East.

When Tony went down last year, Washington took our place as champions of the NFC East, and now that Tony has gone down again, they’ve become the favourites to take our place as champions of the NFC East again. All of this is due to their electric passing offence, led by the perpetually underrated Washington version of Kirk Cousins, along with solid weapons in Pierre Garcon and DeSean Jackson. Recall that suffocating Giants pass defence I just told you about? In just one week’s time, this Washington offence is going to crush them, to the tune of 0.37 EPA per pass. That’s the kind of opponent we’re dealing with here.

This is a lot for our offence, primarily driven by a rookie QB and a rookie RB, to keep up with, but the good news is that we don’t go out on the field against the offence. We go out there against the Washington defence, and their defence is really bad. They rank 27th in the NFL, and even worse than that against the pass. They can get away with this a lot of the time due to their own elite offence, but this defence is the reason this Washington team tended to struggle against elite offences, who could outscore them.

For us to win this game, that’s the blueprint we need to follow. We’re going to have to keep up with Kirk Cousins, and we’re going to have to do it with rookie QB Dak Prescott.

That’s not impossible, but it’s not hard to see why we’re road underdogs.

Our first drive looks a lot like we did playing in New York. It’s clunky. There’s a lot of second and third and longs. Quite frankly, it looks like an offence with a rookie QB operating it, but Dak is able to make the throws when he needs to, and we matriculate our way down to the five yard line, but just like last week, we stall there. We’re held to three, and that’s a dangerous thing when facing this Washington team. Luckily, they punt the ball back to us without scoring, but only after our defence has bent all the way to our own 38, meaning we start with the ball on our own six yard line.

A 29 yard catch and run to Jason Witten gets us off our own goal line, and we ride Zeke all the way to the Washington 30, where we’re faced with a tricky situation. On third and one, we hand the ball off again, but the play goes for no gain, leaving us with fourth and one on the 30. This is touch and go as a fourth down decision, but we elect to go for it. Rookie QB or not.

This is a big sign of faith in the young man, and Dak repays the favour, getting the ball to the proper place under immense pressure for a 28 yard catch and run all the way down to the two, and even with a rookie at QB, it’s hard to mess up pounding the ball with Ezekiel Elliott from two yards out. 10-0 Cowboys.

What a start.

The excitement is tempered when Washington scores very easily to narrow it to 10-7, but this has been a great sequence of drives out of our two rookie playmakers, and it continues into our next series, which is yet another trip into the red zone with no TD, but we do put three more points on the board, and are able to exit the first half with a 13-10 lead. This is slightly disappointing in comparison to the 10-0 lead we had to begin the game, but if you told Cowboy fans they’d go into half with a three point lead before the game started, they’d have taken it every time.

Once again though, the excitement is dulled when Washington comes out of the locker room and beats the brakes off our poor defenders, scoring another easy touchdown, putting us behind for the first time all day, by the score of 17-13. At this point, it begins to be nervous time, because as a team, we are struggling to score touchdowns. There’s plenty of time left, but being behind by more than a FG, especially against an electric offence like Washington, is not a fun place to be.

We can’t score quickly like Washington can, but like we’ve been doing for the entirety of the young season, we work our way down the field. Using the offensive strategy of passing on first down to set up short yardage runs on second and third (the way God intended), we slowly but surely work our way into the Washington red zone again, where once again we run into a problem.

After an incomplete pass on first down, we’re facing second and goal from the six, where the same things keep coming up. Cowboys Twitter is talking about it. The live commentators are talking about it. We just can’t score when we get down here. Everybody is making the same suggestion. How about we stop throwing fades, and have Dak run the ball? He did lead Mississippi State in rushing in his college years after all.

Why not let him try it right here?

It’s not a designed run, but as the pocket breaks down, Dak finds a lane, and punches it six yards into the end zone, giving us the crucial response we needed, and finally scoring a touchdown from further out than the one yard line. It’s about time.

It’s too late into this game for it to be a fluke. These baby faced Cowboys are a real team. One that you cannot take lightly. Washington are the favourites to win the NFC East, and we are competing with them. With that touchdown, we’ve actually taken the lead over them, and winning this game would go extremely far in keeping us alive in the division long enough for Tony Romo to come back.

But once again, the excitement dies quickly.

On the ensuing kickoff, we try a surprise onside kick, and it’s a total disaster. The ball does not go ten yards, so everybody just stands there, staring at each other, and seething at whoever made this decision. Kirk Cousins is good enough on his own. He does not need any help, but we’ve just given him some, and we’re about to give him a bit more, as after that golden opportunity is held to a FG by our defence, Zeke fumbles the football on his first carry of our response drive, gifting Washington a second golden opportunity in a row.

Thankfully, this one is also held to three, but this series of blunders has put us behind 23-20, and it’s again beginning to look like the New York game. We are better than Washington, yet we are losing to Washington. This is typical fare for the Cowboys. It happens all the time in Dallas, but it never feels any less bad, and as the fourth quarter begins, our offence can only go three and out. This gives the Redskins the ball yet again, and as Washington is again lighting the field on fire, barely facing any resistance as they’re walking down the field for what looks like another easy TD, it begins to feel like we’ve let a second divisional game in a row slip through our fingers to begin the season.

This is an important moment for the 2016 Cowboys. If Kirk Cousins punches this ball into the end zone, Washington scores this touchdown, and we go behind 30-20, it’s virtually certain that we will lose this game, begin the season 0-2, and the gloom will begin to set in. We know how this season is going to go once we get past this hurdle, but who knows how the team in general and Dak Prescott in specific would’ve dealt with the mental strife of losing two very winnable divisional games, in his first two starts in the NFL?

Thankfully, we’re not going to get the chance to find out.

Instead of punching this ball into the end zone, Kirk Cousins throws the ball into the arms of safety Barry Church. The score remains 23-20, and we immediately get to work erasing this deficit.

In typical fashion, slow but steady wins the race. Zeke is tackled for a four yard loss on the first play, but no problem, as Dak completes a 21 yard throw to Dez Bryant on second and 14, and this drive is all his from there. A 14 yard completion to Cole Beasley, a 15 yard roughing the passer penalty, a five yard illegal use of hands penalty, and another 12 yard throw to Cole Beasley set us up in the red zone one more time.

This time, there are no red zone struggles. All the throwing has left the rushing lanes wide open. It’s a simple handoff that gets the ball into the end zone again, and we’ve taken a 27-23 lead, one that we do not give up.

From the brink of disaster, with Kirk Cousins inside our ten yard line looking to take a 30-20 lead, we’ve instead found the joy of Dak Prescott’s first NFL victory.

To call this a coming out party is not the word for it. In a game as important as any week two game can ever be, Dak Prescott walked onto Kirk Cousins’ home field, and made him look like the lesser man, generating 0.49 EPA/Play against Washington’s porous defence, ensuring that the team scored touchdowns on three out of our five red zone trips, and doing all of it as our rush offence struggled for the second week in a row, generating -0.23 EPA/Play in this game.

They were there to help some of the time. Not all the time, but that’s okay, because Dak Prescott didn’t need their help today, and it’s crazy to me that it’s taken just one offseason, plus one NFL start, to get Dak Prescott to the level where he can win a battle like this against a top five NFL QB in the Washington version of Kirk Cousins.

I’ve seen impressive performances to begin careers before. Chad Pennington going toe to toe with Trent Green in his first start pops into mind, as does Patrick Mahomes winning a shootout with Ben Roethlisberger in his third career start. There are others too, but the point is that none of these performances came from true rookies, in the way that Dak Prescott’s did.

If you’ve got any ideas for a more impressive performance than this out of the second career start of a true rookie, I’m all ears, because I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything like this, and as we’re about to find out, the unprecedented is quickly going to become common for this rookie QB.

Our next two games are both against really bad teams. Both are easy victories, with Dak generating 0.44 EPA/Play in an easy win over Chicago in week three, and 0.29 EPA/Play to win on the road in San Francisco in week four, a game that saw him have to come back from 14-0 behind after an uncharacteristically poor start, against a San Francisco team that’s, in all likelihood, the absolute worst in the league.

It’s still clear that nobody believes the Cowboys in general, mostly because of Dak, as San Francisco is currently living through their horrifying one season Chip Kelly experiment, but we still had to walk into that stadium as just one point road favourites. It’s possible that nobody yet realised just how bad this SF team was, but it’s also the case that nobody realises yet just how good this Dallas team is.

That’s mostly a QB issue, because as recently as 2014, everybody understood just how good the Dallas Cowboys were. We were favoured against playoff teams on several occasions in that season, and the roster is not significantly different now. If we had Tony Romo at the controls, does anybody truly believe that we would’ve been just one point favourites against a SF 49ers team that’s already well on their way to finishing 2-14?

I don’t, which means that, in the eyes of the public, Dak Prescott is the problem here. He, individually, is the one that has yet to prove himself. I suppose three wins against sub-.500 teams is not enough.

That’s understandable, but don’t look now, as week five will not be easy. Our fifth game is not against Chicago. It’s not against San Francisco. It’s not even against Washington and their 29th ranked pass defence. This game is against a real opponent, as we host the Cincinnati Bengals.

By 2016, the Bengals are a team that’s definitely past their prime. Nowhere near what they were in the good Andy Dalton years in the early 2010s, but as of 2016, they’re still able to put up 9.16 Expected Wins. That’s not a team you can take lightly, and they provide a good barometer as to where the betting public truly thinks the Cowboys are.

The Cincinnati Bengals walk into our stadium as three point road favourites. Note that I said road favourites, which makes this an apples to apples comparison to our game in San Francisco last week. Cincinnati are bigger favourites over us than we were over a 49ers team that’s going to finish 2016 with just two wins. Despite the 3-1 start, and Dak generating 0.49, 0.44, 0.29 EPA/Play over his last three games, the public still thinks that the difference between 9.16 Expected Win Cincinnati and us is bigger than the difference between us and two win San Francisco.

Needless to say, that’s not quite correct.

The Cincinnati Bengals play well in this game. They generate 0.15 EPA/Play as an offence, but we blow their doors off anyway, generating 0.32 EPA/Play as a team with our offence. That’s a 96th percentile offensive game, almost wholly concentrated into Dak Prescott’s 0.36 and Ezekiel Elliott’s 0.27. This is where the football world begins to take notice, and it’s where I have to stop and talk about this.

I’m beginning to get the Trent Green and Priest Holmes vibe off these two.

Ezekiel Elliott is not a comparison for Priest Holmes, who remains the best RB of the new millennium, so the size of the effect is not quite the same as Trent Green got, but it’s the same flavour of offence as those great Chiefs teams I’ve spent so much time talking about. You cannot sell out to stop the pass, in fear of getting torched by Zeke. You cannot sell out to stop the run, in fear of being torched by Dak, and if you try to play both sides of the coin, you get torched by both, like the Cincinnati Bengals did today.

Both players help out each other’s numbers immensely, and when you have two players generating the kind of numbers the Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott are putting up, you become an offence impossible to stop. This holds true for the 2016 Dallas Cowboys, as through five weeks, Dak is generating 0.339 EPA/Play. The rush offence is generating 0.033, which doesn’t seem like a lot on the surface, but that would put us in the top 50 rushing offences of the play tracking era if the season were to end today.

As we all know though, the season does not end after week five. We must keep playing, and in week six, we’re in for a test that nobody quite knows whether our rookie-driven offence is ready for. It sees us going on the road to take on the Green Bay Packers, led by Aaron Rodgers, a man who will not simply be blown out of the water despite playing near his best, like Andy Dalton was.

We won’t get that lucky this time. Throughout this whole process of starting the season 4-1, our defence has remained a tad shaky, giving up positive EPA to every team we’ve played so far, even the awful 49ers. Against a defence of our calibre, Aaron on his own is enough firepower to keep up with us, even as the Green Bay defence is staring down the exact same problem on the other side. How exactly do they plan to stop us?

Regardless, the betting public thinks they will. They don’t think we’re ready for this test. Despite winning four games in a row, two of them by multiple possessions, we are coming in as an underdog for the third time this year already, in just six games, and this time we’re not a small underdog either. The bookies are giving us five points, saying they think the Packers are going to beat us by more than a field goal.

This is weird to me, because although 2016 is one of the best individual Aaron Rodgers seasons on record, this is far from the best Packers team we’ve ever seen. Through five weeks, they haven’t played a single game that hasn’t been decided by one possession, largely because of their 25th ranked defence, and I’ll repeat again, what is their plan to stop us?

The truth is, they don’t have one.

We’re down the field like a shot to begin the game, going up a quick 7-0, but the Packers try to play keep away for most of the first half. Due to some fumble shenanigans on our part, we allow them to do that fairly effectively, but that doesn’t answer the fundamental question of what exactly the NFL’s 25th ranked defence is supposed to do with our fresh-faced rookie super team on offence, which week by week is beginning to develop a reputation as being one of the most unstoppable in the NFL.

When we go from being pinned on our own two yard line with one minute left in the half to still scoring a touchdown to go into the locker room on a high, that’s the symbolic nail in the heart. It only makes the score 17-6, and only takes Green Bay’s estimated WP down to 28 percent (according to NFLFastR). There is still theoretically plenty of chance for them to come back on us in the second half, but it’s just hard for a team to recover from that. How often have we heard that what happens around the half decides the game, because it festers all the way through the half time break? That’s exactly the case here.

Coming out of the break, we expand our lead to 20-6, and then to 27-9, and this game is over. In the end, we win 30-16, and this feels a bit like the 2025 Super Bowl, in that the general public did not see this result coming, mostly due to the name value of the teams and players involved, of which our rookie QB and rookie RB still have very little, but the advanced metric community could see this result coming from a mile away.

As such, I would be fibbing if I said I’m surprised by it, but much like the 2024 Eagles, we’ve finally got the win on the big stage to springboard into the public understanding just how great we truly are. We’re not just beating the Washington Redskins and Cincinnati Bengals anymore. Now it’s Aaron Rodgers that can’t keep up with us, and this is the win that shocks the world into recognition.

Who are these Dallas Cowboys, and who is this rookie QB of theirs?

There’s nothing like mopping the floor with Aaron Rodgers, generating 0.27 EPA/Play to his 0.05, to get the world to learn your name. In light of what happens in the playoffs between these two, this regular season game has been completely forgotten, but I think we ought to remember it.

Dak already had a coming out party against Washington in week two, but this is a coming out party that a lot more people attended. Walking into Green Bay against one of the very best versions of Aaron Rodgers, and walking out with a 14 point win, is something that very few men can do. It’s not something any rookie can do.

No rookie except this one.

This victory is made even better for the narrative, because immediately following it we have our bye week, giving everybody all the time they need to talk about the Cowboys, and naturally, being the QB, a lot of the chatter is dedicated to Dak Prescott doing unprecedented things. People cannot believe it. 0.329 EPA/Play through six starts is the best beginning to a career that any QB has ever had individually, and he’s not done it against tomato cans. He’s taken out two of the NFL’s top five QBs along the way, in Kirk Cousins and Aaron Rodgers, making a convincing argument that perhaps he ought to take one of their spots for himself.

You may think I’m getting wildly ahead of myself, and I would be, if this were not the QB of the Dallas Cowboys I’m talking about. Most of my audience is old enough in football years to remember the middle of 2016, and you guys remember what the talk around Dak Prescott in the midst of this bye week is like. Before the Green Bay win, he was nobody. After the Green Bay win, everybody is forced to take notice, and considering the fact that this is Dallas, you’d better believe they take a lot of notice.

All of a sudden, the Cowboys are big favourites going into our week eight matchup against the surprisingly 4-2 Philadelphia Eagles. They come with a rookie QB sensation of their own in second overall pick Carson Wentz, whose impressive early season performance in outduelling guys like Ben Roethlisberger and Jay Cutler for wins would’ve garnered headlines, had he not been completely pre-empted by our man, to not even be the best rookie QB in his own division.

Like I was saying earlier, it’s not entirely unexpected that Dak is better than Carson Wentz right away, but the expectation was that it’d be a 0 EPA/Play guy outperforming a negative EPA/Play guy. The expectation was not that it’d be the guy who just outplayed and blew out Aaron Rodgers taking precedence over the guy that’s just outplayed and blew out Ben Roethlisberger, but that’s the situation we’re in.

Instead of these two scrapping over the bottom of the barrel, we find ourselves with a matchup between the 5-1 Cowboys and 4-2 Eagles, the winner of which will sit in the number one spot in the NFC.

As I said before, we are the big favourites in this one, and we play like it early, jumping out to quick 7-0 and 10-3 leads, but the Eagle offence is here to play. They’re not letting us get away, and as we work down into the red zone again in the two minute drill, looking to increase our lead to 17-10 as the first half ends, disaster occurs.

An end zone interception stops our momentum right in its tracks, and instead of going into halftime ahead 17-10, or at least 13-10, we instead go into the break behind 13-10, our first halftime deficit of the season. This is okay. It’s not the end of the world. We’re still better than the Eagles, and no defence has been able to stop us all year. We can win from behind 13-10. NFLFastR even gives us a better than 50/50 chance at winning from behind 13-10, but as we come out of the long break, it feels like this INT has taken the wind out of our sails.

We can’t get anything done on offence. Our first touch is a weak three and out as we fall behind 20-10. Our second gets into FG range to narrow the score to 20-13 only because of 30 yards gained by an excellently executed fake punt play, but Philly takes no time at all to pump the deficit straight back up to 23-13 again, and this is beginning to feel more and more real by the second.

Throughout this entire game, there’s been the undercurrent that our electric offence is going to wake back up and carry us to victory eventually, but now, as we’ve reached the beginning of the fourth quarter behind by ten points, that’s beginning to turn into an undercurrent of fear. Fear that we’re about to surrender the number one seed in the NFC to the damned Philadelphia Eagles.

That will not do.

As we walk back out onto the field at 14:09 of the fourth quarter, everybody knows that the time is now. There is no more time to waste. Two score deficits in the fourth quarter are almost impossible to overcome once you get to less than ten minutes left, but as I watch in horror, our offensive possession goes rush for no gain, incompletion, and incompletion.

We punt the ball right back to Philadelphia.

This is a disaster. We’re watching the game slip through our fingers, but with our offensive ineptitude, we just can’t do anything about it. We only have one option now. Pray that our defence is able to get the Eagles off the field before they waste too much precious time.

When we need them the most, the defence gets us one better, forcing a turnover on the Eagle 38 yard line. We’re still walking in quicksand on the offensive side, so can only go three and out again, but this is makeable field goal distance, getting us back within one score at 23-16, and keeping our hopes alive.

Still, those hopes are not going to matter if our offence can never get the ball rolling, and as Philadelphia eats up five minutes on their next drive, thankfully without scoring, that gets us the ball back with 6:26 left on the clock. Our offence is great, but it’s not necessarily fast. Starting a possession with 6:26 left means that it’s likely the only chance we’re going to get, as even with how great Dak has been, he’s still a rookie QB who is not fantastic at operating the two minute drill. That can get dicey at times. Best to avoid it if at all possible,

Here we go then. We have the ball, on our own ten yard line, and it’s touchdown or nothing.

Things get started very well with a 12 yard Cole Beasley catch and run to get us away from out own goal line, but on the ensuing first down the football Gods felt like toying with us. It’s a 63 yard Ezekiel Elliott rush all the way down to the Eagle 15, but it’s all called back by a holding penalty, instead putting us back on our own 12 yard line again, facing first and 20 this time.

This could’ve very easily been the end of the game, with a regular rookie QB in this game. Rookie QBs are not exactly known for bailing out their teammates in times of trouble. More often than not, they compound mistakes, and make everything worse, but Dak does not do that here. He keeps his head, allowing Dez Bryant to catch the ball and run to get 15 of the yards back, and throwing a nice crisp ten yarder to Cole Beasley on third and five. No harm no foul on the holding penalty, but this still only gets us to our own 37, and we’ve used up two minutes doing all this. We won’t win the game this way. It’s just not fast enough. Something has to happen.

What happens is that Dak finds Brice Butler on a beautiful flag pattern to break into Philadelphia territory without benefit of a turnover or a fake punt for the first time since the end zone INT at the end of the first half. It does not take very long from here for Dak to find Dez Bryant over the top, and just like in Washington, from the brink of oblivion, we have tied the game at 23.

This touchdown is scored with three minutes left to play, meaning both teams get a chance to break the tie before the end of regulation, but neither offence has anything to give, so this game has to go to OT. We win the coin flip, and as always seems to happen in overtime, we walk down the field and score. We take seven minutes and 12 plays to do it, but as Jason Witten catches the ball in the end zone, we have averted disaster, and scraped out of this divisional game with a 29-23 win.

Talk about sluggish. I suppose we needed a challenge after so many easy weeks in a row.

After five consecutive games of nobody having any luck stopping us, this was not a good game for our offence, to say the least, but in the end, Dak came out of this generating 0.11 EPA/Play, because he came through when he needed to. He was very bad in the middle 25 minutes of this game, but in most of the first half, and then in the last ten minutes of the fourth quarter and overtime, he was very good.

This is a Philadelphia defensive unit that should not be taken lightly. They’re a top ten total defence, the first one we’ve faced since the Giant game, and for a rookie to do as good as 0.11 EPA/Play against such high quality defensive opposition is impressive. It doesn’t feel impressive, because it’s very easy to get used to a QB generating 0.329 EPA/Play every week, but we must keep in our mind that this is still a rookie.

Rookie QBs are like a child with a paint brush. Every now and again, their intent will come through, and they will paint something very nice, but most of the time, they will just mess up whatever table they’re painting on top of. This is true even of kids that grow up to be great painters, like Jared Goff. Dak Prescott in this analogy is the child prodigy. The one that’s just not like everybody else. The one who came out of the womb knowing what he was born to do.

With that being said, I wonder what Dak’s mother Peggy Prescott is thinking right now. For a woman who spent her whole life adoring the sport of football, I can’t imagine anything would make her happier than seeing her son as the star QB for the Dallas Cowboys, and QB of the Dallas Cowboys is what her son is getting very close to becoming, because after getting back in the easy victory column with a 35-10 win over Cleveland in week nine, Dak Prescott is one short of tying the longest winning streak in Dallas Cowboy history.

Do you remember earlier in the season, when I said the goal would be just to win three or four of these games, to bridge the gap back to Tony Romo? What would you have said if I told you the goal was actually to set the longest winning streak in the history of this team?

I don’t count multi-season streaks, especially so in this case, because the Cowboys’ longest winning streak, if we count two season ones, spans 1971 and 1972, and somehow has a starting QB change in the middle of it, because the Cowboys of the early 70s were very touch and go as to whether they wanted Roger Staubach as their QB1 or not. They eventually came to their senses on that one, allowing Roger to be the QB as this team set what would remain for 40 years the longest winning streak in franchise history, eight wins in a row in 1977.

This is actually not a very long win streak for a team with a history as storied as the Cowboys’, as despite how well run the Dallas Cowboys have always been, they’ve always had a tendency to take early season losses, and not make runs at undefeated records. The Dallas Cowboys have never gotten anywhere near an undefeated season, despite being the best team in the NFL a lot of times over the years. This 2016 team is no different, as we lost in week one also, but we’ve rebounded from that to take seven victories in a row, pulling us into a race with the 1977 squad for the longest win streak in the illustrious history of the Cowboys.

Ludicrously, in an event that can only happen to the Dallas Cowboys, there stands a serious chance of being a starting QB change in the middle of this winning streak as well, as the moment we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived. Tony Romo is due back for week 11 against Baltimore, and both coach Jason Garrett and owner Jerry Jones have each been very coy about saying what exactly they want to do with him.

The common sense answer to this question is to sit Tony down, loudly and proudly proclaiming Dak Prescott as the new permanent starting QB of the Dallas Cowboys. We’re about to tie the longest winning streak in Dallas Cowboy history. Why would either Jason Garrett or Jerry Jones ever want to mess with that level of success?

However, this is the NFL, a place where common sense often does not prevail. This Dak Prescott story has a lot in common with a story we’ve already covered here on my Sports Passion Project, that of Josh McCown.

Josh McCown and the Biggest Snub in NFL History

For those who don’t recall, Josh McCown was brought back to the NFL specifically to be the backup to Jay Cutler in Chicago, but when Jay went down with injury in the middle of the 2013 season, Josh took his chance and ran with it, generating an absurd 0.374 EPA/Play in his six and a half games (257 touches), making Josh McCown’s 2013 the best QB season on a rate basis in the history of the Chicago Bears.

However, instead of riding the wave, and not messing with the good thing they had going, the Bears instead opted to reinsert Jay Cutler the instant he was ready to play again. This decision was a catastrophe, as it splintered the locker room badly. Jay had simply been out too long. Josh had become the entrenched starter, so when the organisation decided that Jay was coming back, to say it split the locker room would be an understatement.

The Bears were a good football team from 2010-2013, and they haven’t been a good football team in a sustained fashion since, largely because of the damage that was done by failing to ride the wave in 2013, and now, just a few years later, we find ourselves in a very similar position in Dallas, with the looming Dak Prescott or Tony Romo decision.

The reason Chicago brought Jay Cutler back in 2013 is that he was a pending UFA, and they wanted to placate him, in an effort to get him to stay, and the 2016 Cowboys are facing the exact same incentives. Tony Romo is a UFA at the end of this year, meaning that choosing Dak Prescott right now virtually ensures that Tony will not be a Cowboy in the 2017 season.

Tony Romo is a top 20 QB of all time, in terms of xEPA/Play, actual EPA/Play, and ANY/A results, so if Jason Garrett and Jerry Jones are going to replace Tony right now, they want to make extra sure that they’re making the right decision, so while it may seem like a no-brainer of a choice on the surface to bench the 36 year old and keep the rookie phenomenon that’s leading the franchise into a tie for their longest winning streak ever, there is more to this decision than meets the eye.

That’s why they haven’t officially made it yet.

Replacement QBs with better results than Dak Prescott has (0.321 EPA/Play through eight starts) have been benched before. I am not making a mountain of a molehill. What he has done so far is not enough to ensure his continued starting position on this fantastic 2016 Cowboys roster.

This is where the buck falls to our man.

Dak Prescott must do something to make himself undeniable. To show the team that he is too good to replace, even with an icon of the Cowboys like Tony Romo, and in case we’ve forgotten throughout this whole process, he must do that in his ninth career NFL start. This is not a fair thing to ask of any player, but when you’re looking to replace a QB in the top ten for career ANY/A like Tony Romo is, the playing field is not level. You must go above and beyond to prove yourself, and our man is about to do just that.

That finally brings us to one of the best games of the entire 2016 NFL season, as we go on the road to face a really good Pittsburgh Steelers team.

These Steelers have just a 4-4 record currently, and are currently riding a three game losing streak as QB Ben Roethlisberger has been dealing with injuries, but I’ll go ahead and spoil that Pittsburgh is not going to lose another game after week ten. Once they get finished with Dallas, they are going to run the table for a perfect 7-0 finish to the year. That’s how good this team really is, and that’s why we go in as underdogs, despite our seven game winning streak.

They are not prohibitive favourites. The spread is three points, but in a game for the longest winning streak in team history, and for Dak Prescott’s starting position on the 2016 Cowboys, we could not have found a much tougher opponent.

I would love to tell you that Dak starts this game hot. I would love to tell you that he screams down the field for an immediate TD and a 7-0 lead, but that wouldn’t be the truth. We do get the ball first, but Dak gets strip sacked on just his second drop back of the game, giving Pittsburgh the ball in our territory, and spotting them an early 6-0 lead, after a failed conversion try.

This is an absolute disaster. The exact opposite of what we wanted. Everybody knows the mid-2010s Steelers are an electric offence, with the terrifying trio of Ben Roethlisberger, Le’Veon Bell, and Antonio Brown. Having to play catchup with them is not a position anybody wants to be in, especially with a rookie QB who’s just made a drastic mistake, and in all likelihood is a little bit rattled.

Thankfully, Pittsburgh’s special teams is all over the place throughout this entire game. In addition to the failed conversion earlier, plus some other things I will get to later, the kickoff following their touchdown flies out of bounds. This great field position allows us to get into FG range with the benefit of just one pass completion, which narrows the score to 6-3.

This is the benefit of having Zeke Elliott and the fantastic rushing offence on the team. We’re able to cut a little bit out of the deficit without giving our rookie QB too many chances to compound his earlier mistake. Normally I chastise teams for not opening up and throwing the ball, but in this case, I think it was a wise choice. The only problem is that against the Killer Bs, field goals won’t do.

Pittsburgh storms straight down the field again, making short work of our poor overmatched defenders, and after another failed conversion they go up 12-3 on us, which makes one thing exceedingly clear. Even with Ezekiel Elliott, Zach Martin, Travis Frederick, and everybody else that makes our rushing offence so fantastic, we are not going to be able to play conservative and run the ball all day long. Not in this game. The Pittsburgh offence has too much firepower. They will simply outscore us if we try to do that.

Most of the first quarter has been spent trying to protect Dak Prescott, which is always a good choice with a rookie QB, even when it’s the best rookie QB we’ve ever seen, but if we want to win this game, we cannot protect him forever. The first two plays of our next drive are both penalties on rush plays, meaning we open up facing first and 25. We’re going to have to throw the ball.

First down is an underneath ball to Cole Beasley that gets seven of the 25 yards back, but second down is the play that rips this game wide open. It’s a brilliantly executed double fake play action screen pass, where multiple Pittsburgh defenders bite on the play fake, which leaves Ezekiel Elliott with nothing but green grass in front of him. He runs 83 yards for the touchdown, and since we can actually make our extra points we narrow the deficit to 12-10, and escape a first quarter in which we spent a majority of the time with an estimated WP below 20 percent behind by just two points.

Watch this clip of the play. It truly is a work of art. Three different Steelers bite hard on the reverse, which the QB must get some credit for. It’s easy to say that the QB has little impact on the outcome of a screen pass, but it’s less easy to say that when the success of said screen pass is so dependent on the outcome of the preceding play fake.

This finally gets our pass game going a little bit as the first quarter ends, but it still cannot get our play callers to open up. As Pittsburgh is at last stopped on their first possession of the second quarter, we get good field position starting on our own 40 again, but Dak is still allowed to drop back to pass just three times.

Dak does account for 22 yards on those three drop backs, but the rest of the plays are handoffs that go nowhere. Due to the never ending special teams nightmare on the other side, this is enough from our great field position to get us to fourth and three from the 35. This is a clear go for it spot, but something seems off today. Our coaches just don’t seem to have the faith in our unstoppable offence that they normally have. I’m not sure why this is, against the perfectly average 16th ranked defence of the 2016 Pittsburgh Steelers, but the proof is in the pudding. We kick the FG to take a 13-12 lead.

No lead lasts long with Ben Roethlisberger and Antonio Brown on the other side, so when our man gets back onto the field again, he is facing a 15-13 deficit, when something extremely unusual happens.

We go three and out.

I know. Three and outs are not a terribly uncommon occurrence in regular games with regular teams, but with these 2016 Cowboys, exempting the Philadelphia game, we almost never go three and out, but this time we did, and it’s not just this time either. We also get the ball with the chance to score some points in the two minute drill before the half ends, and we go three and out there too.

With some luck in the form of a missed Pittsburgh FG, we manage to go into the halftime break still losing 15-13. With how things looked for most of the first quarter, I’ll take that as the outcome at the end of the second, but needless to say, it was not a great half of football for our rookie sensation on an individual basis.

Dak was fine in the chances he did get to touch the ball, with the fantastic 83 yard screen pass and the horrifying strip sack mostly cancelling out each other’s effects, but this first half featured just 16 Dak Prescott touches, compared to 12 touches for players not named Dak Prescott.

16 to 12 seems like a fine ratio, but much of this is biased into the final four minutes of the second half, where there were five passes to one rush in our two three and outs. For most of the half, the touch count was equal between pass and rush offence, and I defer to the Dick Vermeil philosophy. When the pass play to rush play ratio is less than 55/45, something is seriously wrong.

Dallas has been pretty good at this for most of the year, keeping the play distribution between 55/45 and 60/40 in favour of the pass in most games so far. Technically, we’ve done that here too, but it doesn’t feel like it, because most of the passes were skewed into two very unsuccessful drives near the end of the half.

It’s a sign of a very talented team to score 13 points in a half and feel as if the offence is sputtering, and this continues into the second half, where the Steelers open up with a FG to widen our deficit to 18-13, and we respond with a drive of seven runs and six passes to respond with a FG of our own to narrow the score to 18-16, but this is where I need to bring up the individual incentives again.

This needs to be a big game for Dak Prescott. Tony Romo is coming back in one week’s time, and is chomping at the bit to play in the games. Dak needs to do something big to get in the way of that, and he isn’t doing it right now. This is not a negative EPA game. He’s playing fine, but it’s clear his coaches are feeling the need to protect him.

This 50/50 play call distribution is restricting our offence, and it remains an open question as to whether we’d have to deal with these same restrictions with a more experienced QB at the controls.

There is still time to change the answer to this open question, but once Pittsburgh punts the ball back to us there are only three minutes left in the third quarter. We’re behind 18-16 against one of the NFL’s best teams, and our offence is playing okay, but not as great as normal. It’s too Cowboys to say we’re coming up small in the big situation, and since we’re only behind by two points I won’t yet go that far, but Dak Prescott is not his normal self. He has 18 minutes to change that, elsewise who knows how he will be spending the rest of his 2016.

The Pittsburgh special teams nightmare will not end, as this time it’s an electric punt return that allows us to begin our possession on the Steeler 49, but in keeping with how our coaches have called the rest of this game, it’s run, run, run, with a holding penalty in the middle, to bring us to third and 11 on the Pittsburgh 50.

This is a golden chance to erase the deficit that has not been converted upon by our rushing offence. Now, faced with a third and long situation, the Cowboys are forced to throw Dak Prescott into the fire, and at last, he begins to show us what he has to offer.

On third and 11 from the Pittsburgh 50, Dak looks much more like a veteran than a rookie. Pittsburgh brings seven defenders, playing naked cover zero, and Dak shows veteran poise in navigating the pressure to give himself time to work to his third read, which is Dez Bryant a step clear of any Pittsburgh defender. Dak lets the ball go, and he does not miss.

This is a fantastic play. One that most rookies could not make, which moves the score to 23-18 Dallas, and all of a sudden, despite oscillating between 15 and 35 percent for almost the whole game, our estimated chance of winning has jumped to 62 percent, and after Pittsburgh fails to score again on their ensuing possession, it’s jumped all the way to 70 percent.

Unfortunately, on the drive that can put this whole thing to bed, we go three and out again. One unproductive rush. One seven yard pass, and another unproductive rush, before punting, and this hurts. This hurts badly. You don’t need to give the Pittsburgh Steelers multiple chances. That’s exactly what we’ve just done, and they make us pay for it by punching the ball straight into the end zone, failing on their conversion try again, but still coming out of it with a 24-23 lead.

You never want to be losing in the fourth, but this is the chance Dak Prescott needed.

The chance to make himself undeniable.

There are now eight minutes left in this electric football game, and all we need to do in those eight minutes is make up one measly point. I’d love to build this up as a big moment, but quite frankly Dak makes it anticlimactic. Despite just eight yards total from the rushing offence, Dak has no trouble at all taking us the other 67, and we score our touchdown at the two minute warning to go up 29-24.

If only our rushing offence could’ve been just slightly more productive, it may have allowed us to go slower, as leaving Ben Roethlisberger two full minutes’ worth of time turns out to be far too much. Dak’s efforts to make himself undeniable seem to go the way of Aaron Rodgers’, as his game winning drive is snuffed out by Pittsburgh taking a 30-29 lead by way of a touchdown and an unbelievable fourth failed conversion try of the day.

All of that machination to leave us right where we started.

At the opening kickoff of this game, NFLFastR estimated our chances of winning as 42 percent. Even now, after everything that has happened, our estimated winning percentage in this game remains at 38 percent, down by one with 42 seconds left.

If last drive was Dak’s chance to make himself undeniable, this drive is his chance to snatch the starting position by the neck. The first 44 minutes of relative weakness in this game will be long forgotten, overwritten by elite performance in the final 16, but that’s only if we can win. If we end up losing, people will talk about all the missed opportunities in the first 44 minutes of the game. Remember that chance we had at the end of the first half to score, but didn’t? These things become important talking points in games that you lose. In games that you win, they are forgotten.

This is what Dak Prescott is staring down as he jogs onto the field with 42 seconds to go. Not just 75 yards and 11 Pittsburgh Steelers, but the weight of the Cowboy media empire, simultaneously ready to anoint him, should he win this game, and ready to crush him under the weight of Tony Romo should he lose it.

For a man who has won seven starts in a row, there should never be a regular season drive with this much on the line, but when both head coach and owner refuse to commit to you, in spite of all the winning you’ve been doing, you find yourself in situations like this, where just one drive has the power to kill the greatest rookie season of all time in its tracks, should you fail. That cannot happen.

Failure is not an option.

Once again, for a rookie QB in his ninth career start, Dak Prescott shows exceptional poise. Despite having to get 40 yards in 40 seconds for a reasonable FG, he does not try to get it all on one play. He finds Cole Beasley wide open right at the sticks with 30 seconds left, and then Jason Witten wide open at the next set of sticks with 20 seconds left, with full knowledge that with a timeout left, 20 seconds is plenty of time to get 20 more yards.

Most rookies cannot do this, but Dak Prescott can, and the Steelers make the next part easy by committing a facemask penalty on the next thrown ball, to put the Cowboys on the Pittsburgh 32, well within Dan Bailey range. For all intents and purposes, this game is over from here, but just for good measure, an Ezekiel Elliott run designed to get the ball on the correct hash ends up going for a touchdown instead, and we win this game 35-30 instead of 32-30.

This being a touchdown instead of a FG causes the final statement of this game to be Joe Buck talking about the play of Zeke Elliott, and while he was absolutely fantastic, let’s not mince words. The final 20 minutes of this game were all Dak Prescott’s. In those final 20 minutes, exempting the final touchdown run, the rush offence touched the ball a total of nine times, for a total of 13 yards.

I’m not discounting how good they were before that to keep us in the game while Dak struggled through the first 40 minutes, but in the final 20 this is all about our rookie QB, who turned it on to score 19 points in 20 minutes almost singlehandedly. Even if we take three of the points off for the final touchdown and call it 16 points in 20 minutes, that’s still mightily impressive out of a man in just his ninth career start.

We all know that the Cowboy media would’ve buried Dak if he’d lost this game. In the years that follow, the Cowboy media will go on to bury Dak Prescott several times over, even without the weight of Tony Romo behind their claims. The best way as a QB to insulate yourself from all that is to go out and play well and win, and on this day, that’s exactly what Dak did against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Just like against Philadelphia, an electric final 20 minutes saved a rather lacklustre game stats-wise, and brought him up to 0.36 EPA/Play in the game. That’s a really clutch performance in a really tough situation. It pulls the Cowboys into that tie for longest winning streak in team history, and it forces leadership to finally do what they’ve been trying to avoid all along.

Following this Pittsburgh game, Jerry Jones finally affirms that Dak Prescott is the starting QB moving forward, regardless of what happens in the Tony Romo situation. Between week ten against Pittsburgh and week 11 against Baltimore is when Tony delivers his famous concession speech, acknowledging that he was in Dak’s position once, and that he’s going to do whatever he can to help the young man, regardless of how much he hates doing it.

He does hate doing it. Tony once was known for how much he smiled around the facility, and how much he enjoyed joking with the assembled Cowboy media, but in the second half of the 2016 season, you’d be hard pressed to find Tony smiling at any point, and he refuses to talk to the media at all, other than his one carefully written concession speech. He hates every minute of this, and doesn’t necessarily try to hide that fact, but you do have to give him credit.

Tony could’ve gone public, trying his best to ruin what Dak Prescott had going, like Cam Newton did to Mac Jones in 2021, but he does not do that. He keeps himself ready, hoping against hope that his number may be called again, but mostly allows himself to be swept aside in favour of the greatest rookie QB season of all time, and you have to give him credit for that.

Thank goodness this all happens when it does, because while Dak shines brightly in generating 0.48 and 0.52 EPA/Play in dazzling wins over Baltimore in week 11 and Washington in week 12, respectively, in week 13 on the road against Minnesota, he hits the wall, generating negative EPA for the first time in his NFL career.

The Cowboys still win this game 17-15, pushing our winning streak to 11 in a row, but it’s one of the luckiest wins in NFL history, winning despite generating -12.24 EPA as a team, compared to Minnesota’s -6.66. Nevertheless, lucky wins are still wins, and with how elite Dak has been for almost his entire rookie season, nobody is particularly concerned after one bad game.

It is somewhat concerning though when in week 14 we go on the road to play the Giants again. Remember how I praised Dak for not humiliating himself against such an elite defence the first time these two teams played, all the way back in week one? I cannot do that again this second go around, as Dak struggles to a very humiliating -0.5 EPA/Play, a 21 percent success rate (which places this game amongst the worst QB performances of all time by that particular metric), and an ugly 13-7 loss to our divisional rivals, stopping the Cowboy win streak at 11 games.

This loss doesn’t truly mean anything. It only drops us to 11-2, with the next closest team in the NFC being two games behind with three games to go. We’ve got the first seed locked up no matter what, but what it shows is no rookie QB is infallible. Bad days like this will happen, even to the very best rookies. Nobody is immune. Not even the very best ever.

There are no more meaningful games remaining, but Dak uses his final two chances to get back on track, generating 0.16 EPA/Play against Tampa in week 15, and getting back to an elite 0.7 against Detroit in week 16, before resting against Philadelphia in week 17, which takes us to the end of the greatest rookie season of all time.

Dak may have hit the wall after his elite first 11 games of the year, but this is actually a fairly common phenomenon amongst rookie QBs (and players in general) trying to adjust to a much longer season. Fans often put this down to the nebulous effect of the league ‘getting film on a player,’ but I think this is vastly overcomplicating matters. My personal opinion is that guys in the last month of the NFL season get to the end of the longest season they’ve ever played, with four more games to go, and they hit the wall a little bit.

The ultimate rookie QB is the ultimate instance of this, as from weeks 1 to 12, he generated 0.347 EPA/Play, one of the best QB seasons ever, rookie or otherwise, only to hit the wall and generate 0 EPA/Play flat over the final four games. However, he is not the only one. Look at Jayden Daniels in 2024 for another example. His wall came a little earlier than Dak’s did, but in the first ten games, Jayden generated 0.235 EPA/Play, compared to 0.128 in the final eight.

It is by no means ubiquitous for rookie QBs to hit the wall in this way (Robert Griffin III got dramatically better as his season went along, for example) but it is common. Therefore, I feel no need to pay any special attention to it. I feel perfectly comfortable presenting Dak Prescott’s rookie statistics in whole.

In 2016, Dak Prescott generated 0.276 EPA/Play. This is third amongst all QBs in 2016, and best in the play tracking era amongst rookie QBs. Dak got these results on a 4.2 CPOE, which places him seventh in 2016 amongst all QBs. This is not tops all time amongst rookie QBs. It’s not even the best of all rookie QBs in 2016 (Cody Kessler, 4.7), but it’s good enough to say the results that Dak got were not a fluke, and for those who like old numbers, Dak’s 7.86 ANY/A in 2016 is also third amongst all QBs in 2016, and tops amongst rookies all-time.

In summary, Dak Prescott generated 0.276 EPA/Play, on a 4.2 CPOE, with 7.86 ANY/A. He did do it on just 553 touches, while other rookie QBs have done great things with 100 touches more, but the statistical superiority is so clear that I feel comfortable still calling this much better than 2024 Jayden Daniels and his 0.202, 3.5, 6.50, for example. Those are fantastic numbers for Jayden, but he didn’t come into the league as a fully formed top five QB like Dak Prescott did.

In truth, Dak’s competition for the best rookie QB season of all time spot comes only from two places, with only one real argument.

To begin with the lesser of the two bits of competition, we have Dan Marino in 1983. In terms of ANY/A+, his 131 in 1983 does defeat Dak’s 125 in 2016. I do not have much issue saying 1983 Marino was better than 2016 Dak Prescott (and every other rookie QB ever) on a rate basis. However, once we take into account that Dak (and several other rookies) maintained slightly worse but very similar rate numbers over 189 more touches than Dan got, I have no issues letting 1983 Marino slide down the all-time list a little bit. He’s not a real consideration for me, despite in all likelihood being the best rookie QB of all time, if he’d been allowed to play a full 16 game season.

The real competition here comes from a season that I never thought would be eclipsed, and in some ways still has not been eclipsed: Robert Griffin III in 2012. The argument for Robert is an xEPA one. In terms of xEPA/Play, Robert has never lost his perch, with his 0.216 in 2012 beating out Dak’s 0.202 in 2016, with both standing comfortably clear of any other post-merger rookie QB.

Basically all great rookie seasons come as a result of a player greatly outperforming his xEPA/Play with his actual EPA/Play. In some ways, that’s true here too, with Dak’s 0.276 actual EPA/Play coming in well ahead of his 0.202 xEPA/Play skill level, a result of the electric Dallas offence he played on, with Robert’s 0.238 in the real results hugging his xEPA/Play much more closely. In one way, this does make Robert Griffin III better, but in my opinion, the real results on the field have to come into this in a capacity big enough to override a 0.014 xEPA/Play difference.

In basically the same amount of plays (556 to 553), Robert put up a 0.238, 4.1, 7.47 stat line. Comparing this to Dak’s 0.276, 4.2, 7.86, you can see that Dak has a small but clear edge in the real results. It’s tough to decouple this from the miniscule gap in favour of Robert in terms of actual skill showcased. I suppose it depends on what you value most. In my opinion, the real results have to win the day, which is why in my opinion Dak Prescott gets to be called the greatest rookie QB of all time, but that’s only my opinion. You can argue it very easily. I’ll even give you a button to make that process easier for you.

In terms of the best rookie QB in the regular season in NFL history, I truthfully think there are only two real contenders. Dak Prescott or Robert Griffin III, but there is a very fruitful argument to be had between those two contenders. However, I hear what you’re saying. There’s something missing. Dak Prescott has not played his final game of his rookie season yet.

This rookie season isn’t over. Not by a longshot. It’s time to talk about the playoffs.

Now that the 2016 season is all said and done, it’s been made perfectly clear that the 2016 NFC has been a two team conference all along. There are just two teams in the conference that finished the season with better than ten Expected Wins. The clear top dogs are the Atlanta Falcons, with their 12.46, led by one of the best offences of the entire play tracking era, and then there is our Dallas Cowboys, with a slightly more modest 11.70, also primarily led by our combination of rookie stars on offence.

The NFC’s first round (which we sat out of, due to our first round bye) was largely looked upon as a formality, designed to nominate the lambs designated to be slaughtered by the conference’s two real teams once the real playoffs began in the second round. The Atlanta Falcons have held up their end of the bargain already, decimating the Seattle Seahawks 36-20, in a game that was even wider than that on the field, and now it’s our turn, but our blowout is not going to come nearly as easily as Atlanta’s did.

We are not playing the Seattle Seahawks.

We’ve drawn the Green Bay Packers.

When I talked about Green Bay prior to playing them in week six, I said this is one of the more mediocre teams that Aaron Rodgers has ever been a part of, and we drove that point home by defeating them 30-16, in a win that got Dak Prescott and this rookie super team on offence into the national conversation. I had no more time to linger on Green Bay after that, but that loss was a catastrophe for them.

It sent their season into a tailspin, spurring a four game losing streak, and five losses out of the middle six games of the year, at one point dropping them to a 4-6 record and almost hopelessly out of the playoff picture, but thankfully for the Green Bay fans out there, a combination of Detroit Lion ineptitude and a fantastic run of form in winning each of their final six games (four by multiple possessions) allowed the Packers to sneak the NFC North right out from under Detroit in the final week of the season, qualifying for the playoffs after all.

In round one, Aaron Rodgers smacked around that New York Giant defence that gave Dak such trouble all season long, to the tune of 0.34 EPA/Play in a 38-13 victory over one of the NFL’s top five defences, and you can see how this is already beginning to shape into an unfair narrative for Dak Prescott and our Cowboys.

This Green Bay Packer team is white hot, having won each of their last seven games. Five of those games by multiple possessions. These wins have not come against scrub teams either. Taking into account that they obviously cannot play themselves, the Packers have defeated three of the NFC’s five playoff teams in this winning streak, by a combined score of 97-47. They also defeated an AFC playoff team (Houston Texans) by multiple possessions. They defeated 8.35 Expected Win Philadelphia by two full touchdowns. The only game that can be considered easy in this whole run of form is the Chicago Bears, whom the Packers were only able to beat 30-27.

Even if you add in their games against other top competition over the course of the 2016 season, this is a Packer team that was able to hang with the electric Falcons to only lose 33-32. They have additional wins over playoff teams New York and Detroit earlier in the year, but all anybody wants to talk about in the leadup to this playoff game is the one time the Packers could not rise to the occasion.

That one time is of course when our superb offence blew their doors off, walking out of Green Bay with a victory by two full touchdowns. Throughout the football world, the expectation is that this will happen again. Everybody expects the NFC playoffs to be nothing but a formality to get to the Dallas vs Atlanta game that we all want to begin with, at which point the real best team in the NFC can be decided.

However, both contemporaneously and in retrospect, I think this is terribly unfair to Dak Prescott. In his first career playoff start, he’s tasked with facing a Green Bay Packer team that is white hot, led by a QB in Aaron Rodgers that is just as hot as the team around him, and even with these circumstances, the prevailing belief is that anything less than a blowout would be disappointing.

In a narrative sense, this is brutally unfair to the young man. It sets him up for almost a 100 percent chance of failure, because even though we blew out the Packers earlier in the year, there’s just no way we’re going to blow them out now. Not with how they’ve been playing recently. The spread, which is generally the best indicator of the vibe going into a game, is six points in our favour, but that seems extremely wide to me, given that we’ve slumped to winning just three of our final five games, meanwhile the Packers have been the best team in the NFL over the last two months.

Even NFLFastR is playing along with this, giving us a 70 percent chance to win this game at the opening kickoff. I can’t help but think this is really wide, but Dak does get it off to a good start, completing passes of 13, 13, and 14 yards to begin this game with a solid FG, without much help from Ezekiel Elliott.

This is a good start to Dak’s first playoff game, but it becomes clear immediately that field goals will not do, as Aaron Rodgers shoots down the field for an easy touchdown that takes just two minutes and does not see a third down. This is an immediate message that the blowout that many expect is not going to happen, and this reminds me of the Washington game from all the way back in week two.

Our defence has nothing, so the opponent will shoot down the field with easy two minute touchdown drives over and over again. The fact of the matter is that we cannot score like that. We’re not Washington. We’re not Green Bay, but we can score like Dallas, and on our second touch of this game, we’re doing that very effectively.

Five yard run. Five yard pass. Nine yard run. Two yard run. Twelve yard pass. Five yard run. This is 2016 Cowboys football. It’s not fast. It’s not flashy, but it rakes in the yards, and rakes in the points. We’re all the way to the Green Bay 37 this way, without seeing a third down at any point ourselves. This is our way of scoring easily, but under the surface, it reveals a team that is not prepared to overcome back breaking mistakes, a characteristic that bites us hard in this critical moment.

On second and five from the Green Bay 37, Dak completes a 22 yard pass to get us into the red zone, in good position to score a touchdown to take the lead back. However, the Cowboys are charged with an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for a player running onto the field and then running back off without participating in a play. This is ruinous. It’s a 15 yard penalty, which sets us back to second and 20 on our own 48, and this is not a Cowboys team built to overcome second and 20 situations.

Instead of going into the red zone with a great chance to take the lead back, we have to punt the ball to Green Bay, and as somebody whose task is to present the Dak Prescott narrative, I leave myself wondering whose mistake this was. Was it the mistake of a singular player, who thought he was in the game, but as not? Was it the mistake of a coach, who sent in the wrong player for the package? Was it a weak attempt at deception, in hopes the officials wouldn’t notice?

In any case, it was a mistake made by a human not named Dak Prescott, but it weighs heavily on his legacy, because we know what happens at the sharp end of this game. If the Cowboys score a touchdown, or even a field goal, right here instead of punting, it will change everything about the way this game transpires. Instead, we must punt the ball right back to the Packers without any points in response, and they make our defenders look like a college team all over again, waltzing down the field for a 14-3 lead.

This Packer drive eats up the entirety of the rest of the first quarter, which sees us opening the second quarter with a 14-3 deficit. This easily could’ve been a 14-10 deficit, but it’s not, due to mistakes from men other than Dak Prescott, and we go three and out on this drive, when Dak’s pass hits a wide open Terrance Williams in the chest 17 yards down the field, but he drops the ball.

It’s actually miraculous that this ball is not intercepted, as Terrance makes the cardinal mistake of knocking the ball upwards as he drops it. A little bit of good fortune allows the ball to hit the ground, which at least allows us another chance to try for a first down, but it’s hard to get such a good chance a second time. We punt the football, and take one guess what the Packers do in response.

Aaron Rodgers is just toying with our defenders, as this Packer drive sees just one third down also, but they drag it out to last six whole minutes, just for fun I suppose. The outcome was never in doubt. It’s 21-3 Packers, and this is a total disaster.

We’re supposed to be the ones blowing the Packers out. Now the Packers are the ones blowing us out. We began this game with a 70 percent estimated chance to win. Now that chance has fallen to just 17 percent, and the first thing that the television cameras cut to once Ty Montgomery rumbles in for the touchdown is Dak Prescott, looking suitably furious throwing his warmup passes.

The room is silent. So silent that when the referee makes the announcement that we’ve gone to commercial after the touchdown (even though we haven’t, which is why we hear the announcement on the television broadcast), you can hear his voice echo. You should never be able to hear an echo in the second quarter of a playoff game, but that’s how stunned this crowd is.

Whatever those fans may have expected, they did not expect this. We have not been behind by 18 points at any time all season. Our average expected WP all season has been 60.1 percent. We are almost always ahead, and in a good position to win, but we are not in a good position to win this one. This is not a Cowboy team built to make comebacks, but we’re backed into a corner now. A comeback is our only option.

It’s hard to even tell where it got away from us. I know in literal terms where it got away from us. Whoever’s mistake it was to send Brice Butler onto the field only to call him back hurt badly, and Terrance Williams dropping the perfect ball hurt also, but it’s all gone so fast it just feels like a blur, which is why the crowd is so stunned. When the TV broadcast comes back from commercial, the music playing in the stadium is echoing. That’s how quiet it all is.

I’ve watched a ton of football in research for all the articles I’ve written for this publication, and it’s not an exaggeration to say I’ve never heard a playoff crowd so silent. I’ve heard plenty of half empty Jaguars stadiums that sound exactly like this, but never in the playoffs, and a half empty Jacksonville stadium is a good metaphor for just how stunned the people in attendance at this game are.

What shocks me the very most is that as we run out onto the field to try to get our comeback started, Joe Buck goes out of his way to set the narrative, in what in my opinion is one of his very best moments as a football commentator, saying in no uncertain terms that none of this is Dak Prescott’s fault. For just one second, Joe Buck manages to sound a lot like Al Michaels, who did this kind of narrative setting all the time in his younger days, but Troy Aikman stomps all over him, suggesting that the Cowboys ought to try Tony Romo in the second half instead.

You can hear the gears grinding in the commentary team, as Joe Buck has no time for that talk at all. The dirty look comes through loud and clear in the way the two converse with each other immediately after that comment is made, and I have to agree with Joe on this one. Who in the world is Troy Aikman to suggest a QB change after the way this game has started?

Moments like this are important, because this is the NFL world’s first impression of Dak Prescott in a playoff scenario. In my Rex Grossman article from last month, I discussed a very similar phenomenon of Rex being who Dennis Green thought he was, and how that iconic press conference moment coloured the interpretation of the player forever. Things like this last, and Troy Aikman is being very disrespectful by even insinuating that Dak ought to be taken out of the game.

I don’t know what kind of Cowboy legend camaraderie that Troy Aikman and Tony Romo have with each other, but this was not the time for it to come out, especially because Dak is still playing well. In the two plays immediately following the insinuation that he could be lifted from the game, Dak completes passes of 22 and 40 yards, each to Dez Bryant, one for the touchdown that narrows the score to 21-10.

Joe Buck throws an undisguised dig at his commentary partner. Troy Aikman has to just eat it, because it’s just been made exceedingly clear that Dak is not coming out of this football game, as he’s just given his team the response we sorely needed, lifting us off the deck to get within two possessions, and after the Packers go three and out finally, we’re right back onto the field for an effort to get it even closer.

Now that we’re within 11 points, we can go back to playing like ourselves again. Touching the ball with five minutes left in the first half, we can move as slowly as we like, in an effort to not give Aaron any time to respond at the end of the first half, and we do just that. It’s slow, but it’s steady, which sees us facing first and ten on the Green Bay 15 at the two minute warning.

With our three chances from here, Dak throws towards Jason Witten in the end zone all three times. None of these passes are completed, but this drive does still net us three points, and takes just enough time so that Green Bay could not score in response. This leaves us behind 21-13 as we go into the second half, and it’s tough to tell whether to laugh or cry.

Both facets of our offence are playing very well through one half. It was just a few big plays that have gone against us, in conjunction with our defence having no ability to stop Aaron Rodgers, that left us in the horrendous position of being behind 21-3. We are not in that position anymore, down by just eight points now, but in a game that most of the world expected us to win in blowout fashion, that is extremely disappointing.

As I discussed earlier, was it fair to expect us to win this game in blowout fashion with how the Packers have been playing recently? Probably not, but regardless of what’s fair, that was the expectation, and the Cowboys have played well beneath it.

Again.

Before the new millennium, Dallas was not a team with a significant history of underperforming in playoff situations, but ever since a crushing defeat against an Arizona Cardinals team that is one of the worst ever to make the playoffs in 1998, the Cowboys have struggled in the postseason. It’s not been as bad as people on the internet say it’s been, but the Cowboys’ season has ended against teams I would’ve bet on Dallas to beat in 1999, 2006, and 2007 since then. This gives us just a 2-3 record in playoff games where I would’ve bet on us to win in the almost 20 years since 1998, in addition to the 0-3 record in games since then where we were not favoured, and here we are, continuing the trend.

I wouldn’t necessarily have bet on us to blow out Green Bay, but I definitely would’ve bet on us to beat Green Bay, yet here we are, at the half, losing to Green Bay.

Dak Prescott has nothing to do with any of this. He’s a rookie. He was not here for any of this playoff baggage, but all of the weight of 20 years of playoff futility is on his shoulders anyway. This perceived playoff underperformance has spent an entire career causing the great Tony Romo to be underrated, and Dak does not want to get his career off on the same note with the Cowboy fans and media.

However little he may want that, there’s not really much he can do about it, as when the Packers get the ball to start the second half, they cut our defence into ribbons again, which erases a lot of the good work Dak did at the end of the first half, setting us back to a 28-13 deficit.

This is bad, but it’s okay. It’s not too late. Head coach Jason Garrett actually quite impresses me with his willingness to come out running, even with a 15 point second half deficit, because it’s not too late to still play like the Cowboys. We’ve got plenty of time, especially when the first two plays of this drive (both rushes) combine for 28 yards. After that, we mix a bit of the pass game in, with a 12 yard completion to Jason Witten to bring us into Packer territory again.

We get in a little trouble with a third and five on the Packer 33, but it’s not big trouble, as a nifty nine yard scramble out of the man who last season was the leading rusher on his Mississippi State college team moves the chains, which allows us to keep moving forward. A nine yard Zeke run moves us into the red zone again, but this is where our season falls apart.

We try to run WR screen on second and nine from the 19, but Micah Hyde reads us like a book. He jumps the route, and there’s really nothing Dak can do about it. On a WR screen, you stand up and throw. You do not look at defenders, so he throws the ball right into Micah’s arms, and it’s only a heroic tackle from Dez Bryant that keeps our season from ending on this play.

The game may not be completely over, but with this INT, it’s a lot of the way to being over. Our defence has had no luck with Aaron Rodgers all day, and our only option is to pray for a stop this time. There’s almost no chance of this happening, which is why NFLFastR now shows our chances of winning as being a measly eight percent.

As the Packers work their way down the field again, and get into our red zone again, it becomes very easy to wonder where it all got away from us. How have we found ourselves in this position? We’re better than Green Bay, yet we are losing to Green Bay, and there’s almost nothing we can do about it. As an offence, all we can do is hope for a miracle.

Do you believe in miracles?

Maybe the football Gods hate the Dallas Cowboys less than we think they do.

Davante Adams is wide open, a mile behind any Cowboy defender. As Aaron throws the ball up in the air, there is no rational thought process other than to think that this is a touchdown, and our year is over, but as the ball comes down, we see that it’s an uber rare Aaron Rodgers mistake. This ball is nowhere near Davante Adams. In fact, it misses him by so much that I believe there had to be some kind of miscommunication here.

Regardless, the ball falls into the hands of Jeff Heath, and from the brink of disaster we are back to life. We have gotten our miracle, and now it’s on our man to not let it go to waste.

The rushing offence tries to let it go to waste, as first down is a holding penalty, and on first and 20 Zeke runs for -2 yards. This brings up second and 22, almost the exact same situation that killed us in the first quarter after the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, but it’s not going to kill us this time, as Dak finds Dez Bryant for 19, we convert the third down, and we roll from there to the touchdown that narrows the score to 28-20.

Say whatever you want about the Cowboys’ playoff performance, but don’t say we’re mentally weak, and don’t say we’re giving up. An eight percent estimated WP would’ve been a very easy situation to just roll over and die, but we have not. We’re fighting every step of the way, and have narrowed this to a one possession game again. This still increases our estimated WP to just 15 percent, because one INT does not mean that our defence can stop Aaron Rodgers, but that’s more than enough to give us a fighting chance as we move into the fourth quarter, where at the most opportune time, our defence is able to find another clutch stop.

It takes all the way until the nine minute mark, but we are able to jog back out onto the field as an offence, behind by just eight points. This gives us the perfect chance to play some Cowboy football. This is what we do. People say we love to choke in the playoff games, but in the biggest moment of the 2016 season, and the biggest moment the Dallas Cowboys as a franchise have faced since 2007, we make it look easy.

Five runs. Seven passes. Just one third down. Touchdown Cowboys, and following a masterfully done QB keep on the two point conversion try, we have actually tied this game at 28.

How about that for playoff choking?

The Cowboys were dead, staring down the barrel of a 15 point fourth quarter deficit, and an eight percent estimated WP, but we are not dead anymore. In fact, just for a little while, the WP graph likes our chances, peeking up over the 50 percent line for the first time since the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty in the first quarter, 45 in-game minutes ago. Unfortunately, this does not last long, as Aaron Rodgers shoots right back down the field for another FG and a 31-28 score, but he does leave Dak Prescott a minute and a half to do something about it.

This is it then.

The moment we’ve all been waiting for.

The greatest rookie QB season of all time is great and all, but every single play of it is subservient to this moment. We’ve been in this situation before. The mind thinks back to Pittsburgh in week ten, where Dak faced an eerily similar situation. One minute, and 40 yards for a realistic field goal, with the full knowledge that the very weighty Cowboy media machine was going to crown him if their beloved Cowboys won, and crucify him if their Cowboys lost.

We won that day, and that’s a big part of the reason why I crowned him the greatest rookie QB ever, but if we can win on this day, I won’t be the only one crowning him. A touchdown is obviously the preferred outcome, but a field goal is the absolute minimum. Short of that, this whole season will be seen as a waste. All of the greatness of Dak’s rookie season will get buried under the lazy LOL Dallas in the playoffs narrative, and there may even be clamour for Tony Romo to come back.

For one final time, we’ve put the rookie in the ultimate unfair situation. 1:33 left to play. A three point deficit, and it’s all on him.

There is no rushing offence to save him. Not any type of deception. We exclusively pass out of the shotgun, and Dak is able to get it done, completing passes of 24, 12, and seven yards. We are not able to get any further, as Dak’s pass heading towards a wide open Dez Bryant is batted at the line of scrimmage on third down, killing this drive in its tracks, but he does get us close enough to kick the game tying FG, erasing the deficit, and once again leaving us tied at 31.

Of course, we all know what happens from here. Dak does not necessarily leave too much time for Aaron Rodgers. A better way to say it is that Aaron does superhuman things in the 35 seconds he’s left with. Dak Prescott can do nothing but watch as Aaron Rodgers works one of the all time playoff drives, mostly due to one of the best completed passes in NFL history to Jared Cook, and we lose, 34-31.

We lost.

The greatest rookie QB season in NFL history is over, because we lost.

It’s hard to believe even today that the 2016 Cowboys could’ve ever been a one and done playoff team. This team was so good. Our defence was shaky for most of the year, but our offence was so good at playing keep away that it rarely mattered. If the pass game faltered, the rush game could pick up the slack. If the rush game faltered, the pass game could pick up the slack, but today, it just wasn’t enough, and we lost.

This 2016 Packers game gets lazily dumped into the record books as another Cowboy playoff failure, but I strongly dislike that characterisation, because it buries the lead on everything that Dak Prescott accomplished today.

When you get into the big moments, you want to play your game, but in this game we could not do that. Getting behind by so much so early forced us to play Aaron Rodgers’ game against him. Our carefully manicured 55/45 pass to run play call distribution that we’d maintained all season all of a sudden became 45 Dak touches out of 67 plays in the biggest moment. This was not a team built for this. Rookie Dak Prescott was not a player built for this, but despite all that, he was almost able to defeat Aaron Rodgers at his own game.

The Cowboys touched the ball nine times in this game. We failed to score on just three of those tries. One failure due to the Brice Butler penalty. One failure due to the Terrance Williams drop. One failure due to Micah Hyde making a Troy Polamalu-style bonsai read on a WR screen pass. Nine tries, with just three failures, and yet that was still enough to lose, because our man got matched up against Aaron Rodgers on one of the hottest runs of his career, who our defence (shaky all season) just could not put up an adequate fight against.

In EPA/Play terms, Dak’s 0.25 in this game does not match him with Aaron’s 0.36, but he’s a rookie. He should not be expected to match wits with the all-time great that is Aaron Rodgers, in the middle of one of Aaron’s best runs of form ever. Our man got put into a terrible position, in which there was basically no way to come out ahead.

Nobody will talk about how this 2016 Cowboys team was just not built to have our QB touch the ball 45 times. However, they will talk to no end about how the QB ate up 45 of our 67 plays, and that his touches were not quite as good as Aaron Rodgers’ touches, pretending this is a fair comparison.

The Cowboy media will crown you if their team wins, and crucify you if their team loses, and all the talk about this game since it ended has been one giant stary, going in Dak Prescott’s direction. It became the genesis of the narrative that Dak is in some way a playoff underperformer, despite the fact that Dak Prescott (as of writing) has generated negative EPA in a playoff game just twice in seven playoff starts.

I don’t believe Dak Prescott to be a poor playoff performer at all, based largely on performances like this one, where his team got behind based largely due to factors that were out of his control, and he dragged us back into it. He did not quite get us all the way back, but if we had been against any other opponent, this performance would’ve been enough. If we had played the Seattle Seahawks (whom the Falcons got instead) and had this exact same offensive performance, we would’ve been through to the NFC Championship game easily. If we’d played either of the non-first round bye teams in the AFC (Houston or Kansas City) it would’ve been enough, but against Green Bay it was not.

It really is just the luck of the draw sometimes.

It’s tough to give a final summary on Dak Prescott’s 2016, as he simultaneously is well above expectations as a rookie QB who’s just taken over from an all-time great, but merely meeting expectations as the QB of a championship contender. He did not play worse than would’ve been expected in either regard, but as the rookie QB he soared higher than anybody else, meanwhile as the QB for a championship contender, it was rather typical fare, not choking by any means but not dragging his team to a win either.

Throughout the whole of his career, this will remain the Dak Prescott dilemma. Grading him on a curve based upon the situation he’s in, he tends to exceed expectations, but removing him from the grading curve that the wild Dallas Cowboy environment creates, he’s just a regular top of the league guy.

Dak Prescott as a rookie is truly an encapsulation of Dak Prescott as a whole. Through this two part miniseries, we’ve seen the Cowboys both want him and not want him at the same time (a pattern that persists). We’ve seen him play great but have the Cowboy media machine not be wholly convinced (a pattern that persists). We’ve seen him do exactly that in a playoff setting (a pattern that persists), and through that all, he’s been the same Rayne Dakota Prescott, the son of Peggy Prescott, a kid from Southern Louisiana who just wanted to play football for a living.

This is not a His Year article. Dak Prescott will have multiple years better than this rookie season, but I choose to cover this one, because I feel that his electric rookie season is the perfect encapsulation of Dak’s NFL career, as unless something dramatically changes, what he will be remembered for is all the patterns set forth in the previous paragraph.

If Dak ever does win that elusive Lombardi trophy, we can revisit this discussion, but for now, this is my stance on Dak Prescott. He is the greatest rookie of all time, but it feels as if he’s been a rookie for all of his ten years in the league, never able to move past these patterns that were created in his electric 2016 rookie campaign.

He did a lot of good things in 2016. He did have the best rookie season any QB has ever had after all. He won more games in a row than any Cowboy QB ever. He put Dallas into a first round bye position for the first time in ten years, which is only notable because it’s Dallas, who are not exactly a franchise known for their long waits between good seasons. His presence allowed the Cowboys to move on from the expensive Tony Romo, and build one of the best rosters in the NFL for years into the future, but that’s where we get to the bad part.

Did Dallas ever capitalise on those great rosters? No. There have been zero Super Bowls, and zero NFC conference championships. Like I said, this is not Dak’s fault, as he generated 0.25 EPA/Play in this second round game that his team lost, and 0.35 EPA/Play in a 2018 second round game that his team lost, but being the QB, especially the Dallas Cowboys’ QB, he must take these bullets.

All of it comes back to this 2016 rookie season, where who knows what may have happened if just one thing changes? What if Brice Butler just doesn’t run onto the field, and we score that TD in the first quarter instead of punting? What if Micah Hyde just doesn’t pretend to be Troy Polamalu, and we score on that drive too? Even three points on that drive would’ve radically changed the complexion of the game.

There is not very much that stands between us and scoring every time we touched the ball in this game, at which point we certainly would’ve won.

What happens then? Is Dak Prescott with an NFC Championship game appearance (which I would’ve bet on Atlanta to win, but at least the Cowboys would’ve been there) looked upon significantly differently than he’s looked upon now? How does the Cowboys’ behaviour change if they get within one game of the Super Bowl in 2016? Does it change at all?

There are a lot of questions, a frustrating number of which we’ll never know the answers to, but I do know this.

Dak Prescott is the greatest rookie QB of all time. He has significant competition in the form of Robert Griffin III, but in the years since 2016 he has not been passed, nor has he been challenged. I sincerely hope this fact remains as a big part of his legacy, but I sadly think the memory of this rookie greatness is starting to slip away as more and more negativity piles onto the shoulders of Dak’s narrative.

Hopefully, I’ve done my small part in keeping the memory of Dak’s miraculous 2016 alive, and I hope all of us can do the same. This is a man that deserves a little more positivity.

Thanks so much for reading.