Anyone with a screen and an opinion could find any number of throws that embody Dak Prescott’s elite stretch within this special season.
How’s this one? First quarter, at home, Week 13 against the Seahawks. Prescott drops back, pocket not collapsing but tightening around him. He steps decisively into the throw, zinging a pass downfield to CeeDee Lamb with three defenders nearby, close but not close enough.
Or this one: same game, second quarter, Seahawks ahead, 7–3. The Cowboys are in the red zone. Lamb motions to the right. Prescott fakes a handoff as he drops back, with nary a defender in sight. Lamb, despite double coverage, wiggles open, and the amount of time between wiggle and throw is tiny. It’s instantaneous, split seconds. This time, Prescott doesn’t fire the ball so much as he lobs it. Again, Lamb is tracked by two defenders. Again, the throw is perfect, ball placed where only Lamb can snag it. He leaps. He snags. Touchdown.
Or perhaps this one: same game, fourth quarter, down eight points. As Prescott drops back and fakes a handoff, a defensive end is already closing in to his right. The defender wraps Prescott’s body with both arms. This time, he’s wiggling—well, not wiggling so much as escaping by force. He scrambles right, before the broadcast team can correct the sack they just credited to Seattle. But he doesn’t just throw the ball right away, or tuck that thing and run. He waits, moves, waits, moves … and throws to Jalen Tolbert, who sets up near the right sideline.
Tim Heitman/USA TODAY Sports
Point is, anyone paying attention to the NFL the past seven weeks, this season, or since Prescott entered the league in 2016, could point to any number of examples that debunk any number of common misperceptions about him. Has his career gone perfectly? Whose does? Has he overcome stretches marred by injury, turnovers and play that didn’t meet his standard? He has—and more than once, but never quite like he’s doing now.
Consider these seven weeks Prescott’s middle-finger stretch. He’d never say that. He’s not interested in that. When reporters asked about this season’s MVP turn after the win over the Seahawks improved the Cowboys to 9–3, Prescott shrugged. He told them he expected to enter that conversation. That’s him. The goal is a championship, first and foremost. But growth matters far more to Prescott than any trophy or award.
Did he care about winning player of the month in the NFC for November? Not likely, beyond Dallas’s 4–1 record. The 1,597 passing yards, 16 touchdown throws and 120.4 QB rating in that month alone? Doubt it. The Cowboys are on a four-game winning streak, trajectory pointed straight up at the moon, joining favorites such as the Eagles and 49ers in the discussion for the NFL’s best teams (throw the Ravens in there, too). They’re crushing not teams but souls at home this season, where they have scored at least 40 points in each of their past four games, becoming only the fifth team in NFL history to do so. The last two that did—Tampa Bay in 2021 and New England in ’07—both featured Tom Brady at quarterback. Dallas even nearly hit 40 the game before at AT&T Stadium, putting up 38 against the Patriots. And, in their only other home game, the Cowboys hung 30 on the Jets.
Watch the Cowboys with Fubo. Start your free trial today.
So, yeah, there’s a lot to like. Prescott’s growing top-top-top-end chemistry with Lamb. His ability to motivate teammates such as Tony Pollard. His accuracy (70.1%, a career high), touchdowns (26 passing already, only 11 off his career-best with five games left) and everything else. But anyone who thinks Prescott is emerging just now, over this season and those weeks, hasn’t been paying close enough attention.
Statistics tell part of the story. But only part. Start with: an Offensive Rookie of the Year award, two Pro Bowls, 70 wins in 109 career regular-season starts and 21 game-winning drives (or 19% of his total games). If he had thrown for one more yard against the Seahawks, he would have become only the third quarterback in NFL history to notch at least 20 games of 300 passing yards and three touchdown passes in their first eight seasons. Seems likely he’ll do that by year’s end, joining two other signal-callers whose names are quite familiar: Dan Marino and Patrick Mahomes. Prescott did all that despite playing a position that’s arguably the most difficult and overanalyzed in American sports. There’s playing QB in the NFL. And there’s playing QB for the Dallas freakin’ Cowboys, a star among stars. The difference isn’t small.
When Prescott played below his standard, for series or games or parts of seasons, he took accountability and went back to work. When his mom died (of cancer) or his younger brother died (by suicide) or his ankle bent horizontally on national TV, he never lost himself, nor his ambition. Anyone scanning the Cowboys’ brutal upcoming schedule—at home against Philadelphia on Sunday night, at Buffalo, at Miami, home against Detroit before the regular-season finale at Washington—might want to check the résumé. It’s not perfect. But when Prescott is up against it and has everything right around him—coaches, teammates, team health—it’s certainly good enough to win the Lombardi Trophy that has eluded Dallas for nearly three decades. What more could anyone expect?
Wanting a second opinion led to a call with Phil Ebarb, Prescott’s uncle, his mother’s brother, Uncle Phil for short. The conversation started with the perpetual maligning of his nephew, a quarterback who has never had a truly bad season and has fashioned more than a few elite ones. Did Uncle Phil experience a thrill in this season, these weeks? “That’s exactly what it is,” he says.
While acknowledging his biases, Uncle Phil sees criticism of Dak, in volume and sometimes in vitriol, as beyond what’s typical or deserved. Other quarterbacks, he argues, are given breaks for injuries, whether to themselves or to their teams; for the talent that surrounds them, or lack thereof; for all manner of elements that factor into winning NFL games.
The surface view of the polarizing debates around Prescott—whose only real shortcoming in his career thus far is a 2–4 playoff record, but is otherwise, by all measures, the successful quarterback for America’s team—seems counterintuitive, antithetical. But isn’t America that, exactly that, right now, everyone divided, everything extreme? If so, perhaps that makes Prescott perfect for the impossible calculus that is his job description. Not just to throw touchdown passes. Not just to win football games. But to return Dallas to the pinnacle, while most of the world watches and most from one of two extremes.
They’re missing Prescott, what drives and motivates him. This is a dude who cares, who lacks agendas but makes up for them in self-awareness, who knows when he didn’t play his best or when he wasn’t treated fairly but shows up anyway the next day, bearing exactly the same as day before and all the days before that.
“He’s just who he is,” Uncle Phil says.
This week, that’s an MVP front-runner, his odds at SI Sportsbook are +333, just ahead of Jalen Hurts (+350) and just behind Brock Purdy (+300). Nobody else in that book has better than +650 odds. Pro Football Focus has given him five grades of at least 90 this season; no other counterpart has more than three. “We’ve never had a better leader,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. He also told the station, “He’s the best he’s ever been.”
There’s plenty of season left, of course, and it would be foolish to think Prescott and the Cowboys will play this way every week. He’ll need some signature December victories to claim MVP honors, which is precisely the crucible he welcomes, embraces, tames. What should not be discounted or overlooked is his improvement and what enveloped him—criticism, eyeballs, obstacles, grief—as he continued to improve.
“He never stops getting better and better,” Uncle Phil says. “And that’s the difference.” Which could, this offseason, lead to the largest contract in NFL history. Just don’t think for a second that future money is weighing on him now. Prescott already made an astute decision in not pressing for a deal last spring and summer, while Hurts, Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert all took the market even higher.
That’s for another time and another team, his advisers and their counterparts in Dallas. The time to win, to realize the goal he most wants, hasn’t often been better than it is right now. But if this stretch looks like Prescott is putting everything together to ascend into the rarest of spaces for an NFL quarterback—the best version he can be—that’s because, well … he is.
