Dallas Cowboys: Predicting a comeback for Dak Prescott in 2018
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott should be poised for a rebound performance in 2018, and former quarterback Tony Romo might prove why.
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott plays the most difficult position in sports. I’m not talking about just playing quarterback, but rather playing quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys.
Roger Staubach elevated championship football in Texas beyond just the college and high school ranks with Dallas’ victory over the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl VI. A narrow loss in Super Bowl V the previous year to the Baltimore Colts proved that future championships might be on the way, which they obviously were.
Troy Aikman continued the winning tradition in the 1990s in winning three Super Bowls in four years, which re-ignited the America’s Team distinction that Staubach had created two decades before. The Cowboys are the most valuable sports organization in the world because that unofficial title still rings true to this day.
What this means for a quarterback like Prescott is that the bar is set really, really high. Fair or not, comparisons will be made and epectations will be in the stratosphere more often than not, especially when a kid like Prescott wins games early.
Some feel that Prescott regressed in 2017 from where he was in 2016 as a rookie out of Mississippi State who was drafted in the fourth round of the ’16 NFL Draft. Prescott wasn’t supposed to even play as a rookie, the Dallas Cowboys franchise content to allow Tony Romo to play out his days as the face of the franchise.
Plans changed, of course, and Prescott is now on the clock.
But comparing Dak Prescott to the likes of Staubach and Aikman isn’t appropriate for all kinds of reasons. The championship pedigree is the biggest, but there’s still others.
For this discussion, let’s focus on Prescott and Romo, two quarterbacks who have played with many of the same players and both of whom took over the reigns in Dallas at unexpected times. Both have played in the same era with the same number of teams in the league and in the same division alignment.
Curious is the fact that Romo took the Cowboys to a record of 13-3 in his first full season starting for the Cowboys – we’ll ignore the half-season he played in 2006, although we’ll ackowledge that he won his first start in 2006 over the Carolina Panthers as a fourth-year veteran and led Dallas to a wild card playoff berth that year.
Once the job was his and Drew Bledsoe was no longer around, Romo took off in an offense that featured the brutally physical running style of Marion Barber, the younger legs of Jason Witten and the big-play ability of Terrell Owens. That 13-3 record in 2007 was perilously close to 11-5, with a couple of dodged bullets against the Buffalo Bills and Detroit Lions that year, but the Cowboys still ended up with the top-seed in the NFC Playoffs.