Dak Prescott has enjoyed a fair amount of success since taking over for the Dallas Cowboys as their quarterback in 2016. A fourth-round rookie who started his first offseason way down deep on the depth chart emerged as a franchise quarterback. Dallas had immediate success with Prescott, who has earned four Pro Bowl nominations and finished among the top MVP candidates two times in his eight-year career.
But Sunday night’s loss, a 30-24 defeat at the hands of the San Francisco 49ers, put Prescott in a position that hasn’t happened since 2019. With Prescott under center, the Cowboys have lost at least two consecutive games on two different occasions.
Dallas didn’t lose two consecutive games, at all, in 2022 nor in 2023. They lost two consecutive games once in 2021, and that included an Thanksgiving Day overtime defeat to the Las Vegas Raiders. In 2020, Prescott was lost for the season in Week 5, so the last two losing streaks of that year weren’t on him.
Things have to go all the way back to the 2019 season to see a Prescott-led team down this bad. There’s a parallel here, as well. 2019 was the lame-duck coaching year of Jason Garrett. Mike McCarthy and staff are under the same duress.
That season the Cowboys started off with three straight wins before losing three straight to drop back down to .500. They’d win three out of their next four before dropping four of their next five. Things never quite got right with that version of the ballclub and that feeling is familiar as Dallas works their way into the middle of the 2024 schedule.