Skip Bayless wildly claims Cooper Rush ‘almost as good’ as Dak Prescott
FOX commentator Skip Bayless and Dallas Cowboys GM Jerry Jones are cut from the same cloth. Two eternal optimists trying to constantly make something out of nothing. Two guys who will loyally assume this team can do things they can’t, even when the owner doesn’t do anything to help the roster.
Now, we know Bayless is a lifelong Cowboys fan. He is 100% biased when he speaks about Dallas, and everyone knows that. However, there are many other broadcasters (take Marcus Spears for example) who can love this team but also recognize when things are a mess.
That’s not what Bayless did this week on “Undisputed,” and his co-host Shannon Sharpe understandably trolled him for it.
When talking about the debacle that was Dallas’s horrific Sunday Night Football loss, the two discussed what the near future of this team looks like without Dak Prescott. It’s one thing to have a bit of faith in backup QB Cooper Rush. It’s a whole other story to say something like this on national television with a straight face:
"“I can make a case that Cooper Rush is almost as good as Dak and sometimes I think he can be a little more consistent than Dak. When has Dak every shown you any routine consistency?” -Skip Bayless"
It’s worth noting that Bayless, the Cowboys optimist, all of a sudden throws Prescott under the bus as a not-great quarterback just to prove a point about the new guy at the helm. The narrative would probably be much different if No. 4 were healthy for Week 2.
Sharpe hilariously responded with, “you need to put that in a briefcase and walk up out of here.”
“You can make a case that Cooper Rush is almost as good as Dak” - Skip
— Action Network (@ActionNetworkHQ) September 12, 2022
"You need to put that in the briefcase and walk up outta here" 😂pic.twitter.com/x54KOl5lho
Skip Bayless tries to argue that Cowboys backup QB Cooper Rush is “almost as good” as Dak Prescott
Look. Prescott did not have a great night in Week 1 before he got hurt (although he also didn’t have any semblance of an offensive line or receiving corps to help him). But to try and legitimately compare Prescott to Rush is abysmal.
It’s true that the backup did miraculously lead this team to a Sunday Night Football road victory against the Minnesota Vikings in 2021. But it’s also true that Rush had a pretty mediocre 2022 preseason, and oftentimes got outplayed by third-string QB Will Grier.
With Jones insisting that Prescott may be back sooner than some think, it doesn’t entirely make sense to try and bring in Jimmy Garoppolo or Cam Newton because they’d have to learn an entirely new system. By the time they did that, the QB1 would be close to being back. Rush, on the other hand, has a large advantage of being immersed in the Cowboys’ system for several years.
However, that does not equate to him being “almost as good” as a starting-level quarterback. There are far better backup QBs sitting on benches for other franchises. We can all hope that Rush shocks the world again and brings the Cowboys some Ws in the next few weeks, but hopeful and blindly optimistic are two very different things, and it’s very clear which one Bayless is.
