When it comes to history of Dallas Cowboys QBs, Dak Prescott is better than Tony Romo
One week after playing one of the worst games of his NFL career, quarterback Dak Prescott played like the MVP candidate that he is in the Cowboys’ 43-3 win over the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday.
Whatever concerns, or fears, you may have had that Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys were cornered into giving Dak a contract extension that would slowly strangle their roster have been dismissed.
In 2021, Dak is playing like one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, and he is fast approaching a territory that he’s better than the guy he replaced as the starter.
Actually, we are there: Dak Prescott is better than Tony Romo.
Dak doesn’t have Romo’s stats, but he has this team in a way the current CBS color announcer never did.
Romo is either the third or fourth-best quarterback in the history of the Dallas Cowboys, an argument that depends on your age and affinity for the Tom Landry era.
(To educate the uneducated: Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman are your No. 1 and 2. Don Meredith, who was the NFL’s MVP in 1966, always merits mention in these discussions, but his career was so short by comparison he won’t rank ahead of these others.)
With superior stats, Romo would rank slightly ahead of the underrated Danny White, who led the Cowboys to three straight NFC title games in his career.
Now in just his sixth NFL season, Dak is not going to have the career stats of these other gentlemen, but to the naked eye he’s in the conversation with all of them as No. 3.
Dak is doing what Romo did so well in the final few seasons of his career; Dak is winning with good players, and making average talent look great.
Dak’s accuracy is not quite to the precision of an Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson or Tom Brady, but it’s close. Dak is not missing anyone right now.
It was the one part of his game that people weren’t sure would become elite.
After Dak’s dog awful day against the Broncos last week, when he was so bad he could have missed the sky despite falling from a helicopter, it re-planted a few seeds that maybe what Denver did was the plan to beat him.
Dak made a point to say he wanted the Falcons to defend the Cowboys the way the Broncos did.
“[Atlanta] tried that early and I think, as I said last week the reason I wanted it was because we didn’t play a good game,” Prescott said after Sunday’s win. “If they think that was the recipe for success to beat us, good luck to them.”
Dak was so good on Sunday against the Falcons he was on the bench the entire fourth quarter. He passed for 296 yards with three total touchdowns in three quarters.
It was the accuracy component that, as a passer, Dak was inferior to Romo.
Much like the top passers in the game, Romo could take your WhoIsThatGuy? tight end, or NoName receiver, and put the ball in his lap.
Dak does have Amari Cooper, CeeDee Lamb and Michael Gallup, but he’s making a guy named Malik Turner look like a competent NFL receiver.
It was the same thing that Romo once did with Terrence Williams, Laurent Robinson and a few other people you can no longer name.
If you want to argue that the team around Dak is better than Romo, you are right.
Dak was handed a good team when he was shoved into the starting role as a rookie in 2016.
But, Romo was given a good team, too when he became the starter in 2006. In multiple seasons he had good teams around him, and the results never did quite match some of his pretty stats.
What Romo did to become the quarterback of the Cowboys was almost as remarkable the 10 seasons he was their starter.
Romo often single-handedly kept inferior teams relevant for the entire duration of a season. He played some behind some bad offensive lines, and often took a beating.
He was never afraid of a game, or a play, but his you-only-live-once attitude could work against him at the worst times. Not until the final few years of his career did he ever defeat his tendency to make the killer mistake.
Dak has not been demanded to do everything because the circumstances haven’t required them, but the way he is playing this season says he could do so if needed.
After 77 NFL starts, he sees everything and knows what’s coming. He has settled down as a passer; his feet don’t bounce around and fiddle as much.
“He’s a lot more comfortable in the offense. We build around him,” Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy said. “This is a quarterback-friendly, quarterback-driven system.”
Dak can drive it so well he’s actually passing the man he replaced.
