Breaking down PFF’s three bold takes for the Cowboys’ 2022 season

It’s exciting to say that the Dallas Cowboys‘ 2022 season is truly just around the corner. The offseason began with a plethora of question marks from coordinators interviewing for head coaching jobs to Mike McCarthy’s future with the team to wide receiver room issues and much more.

As always, there are Cowboys fans who are incredibly optimistic about this team and some who feel the franchise is doomed to fail once again. At this point, any predictions we make are just guesses but ’tis the season for hot takes. We already made some bold predictions of our own for this 2022 team, but we wanted to take a look at what other publications are saying about Dallas for this season.

Pro Football Focus recently released their hot takes for each NFL team. Some of them are quite out there. Let’s take a look at their predictions and see which we think are plausible or not.

Breaking down PFF’s 3 bold predictions for the Dallas Cowboys in 2022

1. “This year, Dak Prescott will post his worst PFF grade since 2018”

PFF grades are incredibly complicated. The site evaluates every single play for each individual player for a season to give them a number grade based on far more than just individual stats.

The site’s first hot take for the Cowboys is that Dak Prescott will have his worst PFF grade since 2018. This seems pretty over the top. Here are Prescott’s final PFF grades for the last four seasons:

• 2021: 83.8
• 2020: 85.2
• 2019: 80.1
• 2018: 74.6

Given that the Cowboys QB is the healthiest he’s been since 2019 and should be able to be far more mobile this year, it seems unfair to assume he’d score worse than a 74.6 on the year.

To put this in perspective, here are some quarterbacks who scored below 74.6 in 2021: Justin Fields, Daniel Jones, Carson Wentz, Sam Darnold, Zach Wilson, and Jared Goff. While Prescott may not be on par with Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers, he is certainly not at the same caliber as that first set of quarterbacks mentioned.

Here is why PFF thinks he’ll struggle:

"In the past, when Prescott’s supporting cast wanes, so does his play. It wouldn’t take much of a decline for him to earn an overall PFF grade in the 70’s rather than the 80’s, which would be his worst year since 2018."

Even without Amari Cooper and Michael Gallup for some time, you have to imagine Prescott is not going to grade above the likes of Jones, Wentz, and the other lower-tier quarterbacks in the league. People love to criticize and ridicule Prescott, but the reality is that he has a lot of great attributes and is significantly more reliable than at least 20 other starting NFL QBs.

It may not be his best year, but I’d be surprised if he gets below an 80.0 overall score when all is said and done.