Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, by virtue of his position and his team's prominence, is one of the most polarizing players in NFL discourse. Talk at all about Prescott's high level of performance during his tenure with the team, and you will surely be met with critiques of his poor playoff record. Talk at all about the playoff record, and you will be hit with a barrage of stats that show how good a player he is.
One of the people best-positioned to talk about that dynamic is former Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett, who coached Prescott's team for the first four years of his career.
"I just think he's a fantastic football player and has been [from the start]," Garrett said of his former QB during an appearance on the This Is Football podcast with ESPN's Kevin Clark. "We were fortunate to have him. We drafted him in the fourth round. His rookie year, he comes in, Kellen Moore got hurt, Tony Romo got hurt. ... We went 13-3. And we were really 13-2, we didn't play him in the last game. He just, to me, he's been fantastic right from the start, and he's gotten better and better and better."
Prescott has indeed gotten better and better over the years. He was a Second Team All-Pro and the second-place MVP finisher in 2023, which was the first time in his career that he led the NFL in touchdown passes. But he backslid along with the rest of the offense in 2024, even before he suffered a torn hamstring that knocked him out for the remainder of the season.
"I do think that quarterbacks, in so many ways, their performance can be a reflection of what's going on around them," Garrett said. "And when the Cowboys have run the ball well and played good defense, Dak Prescott has played at a really high level."
Now, quarterbacks often are a reflection of what's going on around them. That's true. But several of Prescott's best seasons have actually come in years where the team struggled to run the ball (2018, 2023) and/or had a bad defense (2020, before he suffered a season-ending injury). Of course, everything always comes back to the playoffs. And the last three times the Cowboys went to the postseason, they exited in embarrassing fashion. And that conversation follows Prescott.
"Now, he'd be the first to tell you, there have been some disappointments in the playoffs. Legacies are made by winning playoff games and winning Super Bowls. We get all that," Garrett said. "But there have been a lot of great players in this league playing that position, who early on in their career, had some struggles; and then when they broke through, they broke through. And typically, they broke through because the team around them had gotten better.
"I think about John Elway, one of the greatest players ever to walk. For years, John Elway would take the Denver Broncos and put them on his shoulders and take them through the playoffs or to the Super Bowl, and they'd have these disappointing losses. And they did because they weren't as good as the team they were playing. And then when they got better and they got Terrell Davis, and they run the football and all of that, all of a sudden John Elway is holding the trophy over his head. Peyton Manning, similar arc, some other guys [as well].
"So, I think it's important to recognize that it's a team game. Everybody's a part of it, and when the team around Dak, like any quarterback, has gotten better, he's played at a really, really high level. And there's no reason to think he can't do that for the rest of his career."
Prescott will turn 32 years old this July. He's not one of the young and upcoming quarterbacks anymore, but he's also probably not that close to the end of his career just yet. There's plenty of time for him to craft an Elway-esque career arc, or even one that looks like Matthew Stafford, who was 33 years old and had a grand total of zero playoff victories (and only three appearances) before being traded to the Rams and winning a Super Bowl in his first season in Los Angeles.
Whether that can happen for Prescott in Dallas is another story because of the organization's various other shortcomings. The Cowboys will have a new head coach next season, but it doesn't look like they'll be making meaningful changes to the way they operate. And unless and until that happens, we might be looking at more results like the ones seen so far -- really good regular seasons, but a team that doesn't have enough to compete with the best of the best come playoff time, which results in the quarterback taking the lion's share of the blame.