Once the Dallas Cowboys gave him a true No. 1 receiver by trading for Amari Cooper, Dak Prescott has continued to elevate his game. Few NFL quarterbacks have slung the football around like the former Mississippi State Bulldog has since the middle of the 2018 season.
While his 2020 campaign ended prematurely with a horrific compound fracture and dislocation of his right ankle, the record pace he was on still cements him as one of the league’s best players. Earlier this week, teammate Ezekiel Elliott was ranked the NFL’s 88th best player by Pro Football Network. Now, the quarterback joins him at No. 54 on the list.
“Dak Prescott drops a few spots year to year, but that’s presumably due to the season-ending injury he suffered in Week 5 against the New York Giants,” offers Dalton Miller. Prescott signed a huge deal in the offseason after lighting defenses on fire before his untimely injury. He appears to be on schedule to start in 2021, and with Amari Cooper, CeeDee Lamb, and Michael Gallup, it’s difficult to see a situation where he doesn’t compete for a passing title this year.”
“Prescott’s improvements in his footwork led to drastic improvements in his accuracy in 2019. That carried into 2020, along with his propensity to test defenses instead of playing passively. He could very well play his way into contention for the final page of the NFL Top 100 Rankings going into 2022.”
In the four full games Prescott played last season he was torching defenses weekly. He threw for 1,690 yards over that span and became the first quarterback in NFL history with three consecutive games of 450 passing yards or more. Amari Cooper, Michael Gallup, and CeeDee Lamb were all on pace for 1,000 yards during this stretch as well, and they would’ve been the first receiving trio to do so since Larry Fitzgerald, Anquan Boldin, and Steve Breaston of the 2008 Arizona Cardinals.
The absence of Prescott affected the Cowboy’s offense tremendously. They averaged 32.6 points per game with Prescott but that number dwindled to 21.1 under Andy Dalton, Garrett Gilbert, and Ben DiNucci. Gallup and Lamb didn’t quite reach the 1,000-yard pace they were on with Prescott and defense’s were able to load the box against Elliott seeing as they didn’t respect the Cowboys passing game, and he never quite got going all season, failing to reach 1,000 yards for the first time in a full campaign.
Prescott is back under center and fully recovered from his gruesome injury, and there’s little doubt that he’ll continue carving up defenses at will. He’s ready to put last season’s injury behind him, as he explained last month.
“I’ve buried the injury,” Prescott said. “Honestly, guys, you know me, from the point of practice, from the point of just moving forward and going about my life, I’ve buried it mentally. And I think you guys and a lot of people around have to help me in burying it as well as we move forward.”
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