Despite a down day vs Texans, Cowboys’ Dak Prescott still clearly the guy

There is an interesting conundrum among Dallas Cowboys fans at the moment which needs a bit of addressing. The issue is how fans spin the narrative around Dak Prescott to fit their preferred narrative. Very few other teams argue over their franchise quarterback as much as Cowboys fans do — and frankly, some fans want their cake and to eat it, too.

First thing’s first, there is no sugar coating the performance he had against the Texans. The interceptions were ugly and made this game closer than it should have been.

No one is denying that. Prescott himself even admitted it was a poor outing.

Cowboys’ Dak Prescott still showed up when it mattered most vs Texans

But what Dak did do was show up in the biggest moment of the game and engineer a 98-yard game-winning drive. That is something that top-level franchise quarterbacks do. They find a way to win the game. Not every Sunday in the NFL is roses and champagne. Sometimes it takes ugly wins. Other quarterbacks gut it out, and the narrative for them is they can win ugly. When Prescott does it, the narrative turns to how he barely survived the game.

Either that, or his role in the comeback is downplayed.

The biggest gripe some have about Dak is that he can’t win in the clutch. But then, when he does go win games (and he does it a lot, which we will discuss later), he doesn’t win them the way fans would like. What is it? Does he need to win games, or does he need to have style points? It’s the NFL. Go win the damn game.

Let’s look at the “clutch” argument some fans want to make. We will use game-winning drives for this metric, which is literally the most clutch thing a quarterback can do. Dak has 18 game-winning drives since 2016, the most in the entire NFL from 2016-2022. It also has him 11th overall in active quarterbacks, trailing Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Matthew Stafford, Russell Wilson, and more veteran quarterbacks who each have at least four more years in the NFL than Dak. Sounds pretty clutch to me.

Let’s keep going, though. Let’s talk about simply winning games, which at the end of the day is the only thing that matters whatsoever in the NFL. Prescott is 55-34 in his career. That is a .617 winning percentage. That would place him with the eighth-highest winning percentage among quarterbacks in the history of the NFL. Seems like he is winning games.

For comparison’s sake, we can dive into a more relevant time period — say 2016-2022, the duration of Prescott’s career. Since he has joined the league, he has the fifth-most wins in the NFL. The names he trails? Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Patrick Mahomes, Russell Wilson. I’d say that’s pretty good company.

Should we want to get more granular with stats, here are a few to chew on. Dak has the sixth-highest completion percentage of all-time. Dak holds the seventh-best touchdown-to-interception ratio of all-time. Dak has the seventh-best passer rating of all-time. Not just of the QBs who held the role during his career. Those numbers are all-time.

At the end of the day, Cowboys fans can debate it all they want. It is just simple fact that Prescott wins games. If you care how he does it, then best of luck with your style points. If you’re hung up on the fact that he doesn’t play well enough, then you are just ignoring the only stat the matters, which is winning.

Dak Prescott wins games. He wins them in the clutch. He wins them in general. And he puts up the overall statistical numbers to back it up. His late-game heroics won the game in the clutch, laying waste to a false narrative in the process.

His game-winning drive — paired with the cold, hard factual evidence — shows us 40 million reasons that Dak Prescott is the franchise quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.

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