“There was a lot of good football that will totally go unrecognized,” Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy told reporters in his postgame interview on Sunday. “That’s what happens when you lose.”
Cowboys Nation is rightfully disgusted by the team’s 49-38 home loss to Cleveland. But McCarthy’s correct: the play of the historically bad defense makes it easy to lose sight of the otherworldly streak that quarterback Dak Prescott happens to simultaneously be on.
Sunday marked his third straight game with over 450 passing yards. He’s the first player in league history to do that.
But to the 27-year-old quarterback, the only numbers that concern him are in the team’s win and loss columns. And 1-3 aren’t the digits he wants to see there.
“I’d give all those yards back for a different record. I care about one stat, and that’s to win. So when we don’t do that, no other stats matter.”
Prescott turned in another eye-popping performance in Week 4. His 41 completions are tied for second-most in Cowboys history; his 58 pass attempts are third-most for any Dallas passer. But those figures simply speak to the massive hole the team had dug for itself on Sunday. Cleveland was up by 27 points as the fourth quarter got underway.
The quarterback led the Cowboys offense on three straight touchdown drives, each of which was capped with a successful two-point conversion to cut the deficit to just three with less than four minutes to play.
On those three drives alone, Prescott went 17-for-23 on 29 total plays, throwing for 208 yards and two touchdowns. The possessions covered 77, 84, and 80 yards.
Odell Beckham’s 50-yard scamper killed the Cowboys’ momentum, but didn’t ice the game. Down by 11 with more than three minutes to work with Prescott tried to engineer the second-most improbable comeback win for Dallas in a three-week span.
The rally finally ended when the two-time Pro Bowler was intercepted inside the Browns’ ten-yard-line. It was his second turnover of the afternoon, following a strip fumble early in the second quarter that led to a Browns score.
For McCarthy, though, Prescott is the only reason the Cowboys ever had a hope of stealing a win.
“Dak is exactly what you’re looking for,” the coach said afterward. “He’s wired the right way, his ability to just keep playing through adversity. He never blinks. Obviously, the turnovers: you take a look at them, why they happened, how they happened. It’s like anything in this game; the negatives are usually not just one thing or one person, so we’ll take a look at that. But I thought Dak stood tall and led us back to give us a chance to be in the game there at the end.”
The quarterback himself was more focused on the team’s errors than the fantasy stats he produced.
“Making the same mistakes over and over again,” Prescott explained after Sunday’s loss. “We keep hurting ourselves on offense, putting our defense in a bad spot. And not starting fast enough; that’s what’s been killing us over the last few games and once again, it’s what hurt us tonight.”
After initially falling behind 7-0, Dallas responded with consecutive touchdown drives. But it was a collapsing pocket that allowed Cleveland edge rusher Myles Garrett to get to Prescott and knock the football from his grasp as he cocked his arm for another throw.
Prescott, though, refused to lay fault at the feet of his beaten and battered offensive line.
“I’ve said it before: those guys are going to go in there and they’re going to battle their tails off,” Prescott said. “Let’s get this right: Myles Garrett is a hell of a player, one of the best pass rushers in this game. He was fighting, he was giving it his all. Myles did a good job of getting to me. Obviously, we were setting up a little double move there, and Myles got to me, got to the ball. As I said, we can’t continue to turn the ball over. I’ve got to be better somehow and help that tackle out, move around, get off my spot. We’ve got to continue to work on these little things and these things that are hurting us.”
On the very next offensive play, Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott coughed the ball up again. Another short field for the Browns, another Cleveland touchdown. The nightmare was on.
“We just can’t do that, simple as that. We get two back-to-back possessions, and we turn the ball over, and we put our defense in a compromising situation. That’s just unacceptable. That’s not complementary football. It’ll eventually hurt you and get you down in the game, and now we’re forced to play outside of the way that we want to play. We’ve got to play better complementary football and help our defense.”
Fueled by the turnovers and helped with great field position, the Browns ripped off 24 unanswered points before intermission.
Down 38-14 after Cleveland’s opening possession of the second half, Prescott believes he tried to do too much to will the Cowboys back into contention.
“We can’t press. And I think I may have done that personally a little bit early in the third quarter. But you can’t press. When you get down in games, we’ve shown that we can continue to come back. That’s something that we have to avoid trying to do, trying to press, trying to be perfect. It will all click if we just- as I always tell the offense- we all take care of our jobs individually, it will work well together. We’ve just got to focus on doing our job handling our side of the ball and giving our team the best chance to win.”
Now in his fifth season, Prescott says he’s becoming more aware of those moments on the field and is getting better about reeling himself back in so as not to compound routine gameplay mistakes with insurmountable football decisions.
“You’re trying to make every throw. You’re trying to make the perfect throw. And then when it doesn’t work for a drive or so, that’s usually the time for me to snap back out of it and realize that’s why I was trying to make those throws, and those weren’t throws that I’d normally make if I just allow the offense to come to me and read the defense in the correct way.”
While Prescott’s mistakes- three interceptions and three fumbles in four games- have contributed to the team’s poor turnover margin and disheartening 1-3 start, it’s Prescott’s relentless and record-breaking air assault that has kept the Cowboys in every game this season.
If he tops 400 passing yards next week against the Giants, Prescott will become the first player ever to do that four weeks in a row. His 502 air yards versus Cleveland was just four short of the Cowboys’ single-game record. He tossed 29 first-down throws on Sunday, the most since that stat has been kept. As absurd as it would be, he’s on pace right now for over 6,700 passing yards in 2020, which would smash Peyton Manning’s record by nearly 1,300 yards.
With the steady improvement he’s shown ever since his transcendent rookie campaign, all of the gaudy stats shouldn’t surprise anyone when it comes to No. 4. Prescott has proven himself to be a dedicated and tireless worker, going from a largely unknown fourth-round draft pick to one of the league’s elite passers.
The shock, however, is that it hasn’t been enough to translate to more wins for this Cowboys squad who had such lofty expectations for the season.
“I’m surprised,” the Mississippi State product admitted. “Obviously, I’ve got all the confidence in this team, each unit that we have. I see the way we prepare throughout the week. It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t add up right now. But I believe in the men that we have, the great leaders and coaches that we have, that we’ll have it fixed.”
Prescott is quickly building himself a reputation for leading unlikely comebacks after falling way way behind.
So maybe he’s got the 2020 season right where he wants it.
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