Whenever a quarterback who fell in the draft emerges as a quality starting option, you start to hear chatter about which teams wanted to draft that young quarterback but missed on the opportunity. We've seen it with Tom Brady and Russell Wilson and now we're seeing it with Dak Prescott.
The Cowboys rookie quarterback fell to the fourth round of the 2016 NFL Draft with every team, including the Cowboys, passing on him multiple times. He finished the year with the highest passer rating by a rookie quarterback in NFL history and it could've been with the 49ers, who, according to NFL Network's Mike Garafolo, really liked Prescott before the draft.
In fact, Garafolo reported Monday morning that Chip Kelly wanted to draft Prescott but essentially got vetoed by GM Trent Baalke.
"There were a lot of people in that building, including Chip Kelly, I am told, who liked Dak Prescott going into the draft," Garafolo said. "So the fact that Prescott was tearing it up for the Cowboys while the 49ers were sitting there saying 'We have an extremely unsettled quarterback situation, we liked this guy before the draft, why is he not on our team?' That was part of the downfall for Baalke."
The 49ers did take a quarterback later in the draft, selecting Jeff Driskel from Louisiana Tech with a sixth-round pick, their first pick used on a quarterback since taking B.J. Daniels with a seventh-round pick in 2013 (Colin Kaepernick as a second-round pick was prior to that in 2011).
And there are some caveats to mention here. It's not like Prescott was an obvious success story. Some idiot ranked the backup situations around the league and had the Cowboys in dead last. What a moron.
Even Jerry Jones didn't know what they had -- the Cowboys owner was lamenting his inability to trade back into the first round and select Paxton Lynch. That likely would have prohibited the Cowboys from picking up Prescott with a fourth-round selection.
Plus, Tony Romo could've stayed healthy (no, really) and Prescott could've never seen the field.
And there is absolutely no guarantee that if Prescott is drafted by the 49ers he has anything close to a similar season. The talent in San Francisco is drastically different than the talent in Dallas.
It's still a fascinating "what if" scenario though -- think about how the Cowboys season plays out in this case -- and a good insight into how aggressively people in the NFL can focus in on a single roster decision when deciding the long-term fate of coaches and others.
