Prescott no longer regarded in same way after injury.
Prescott shows that he isn’t invincible after promising season comes to gruesome end
ARLINGTON — The cart that’s used to funnel injured football players off the field to training rooms or, in some cases, to cars to be driven to local hospitals had already made two trips through the tunnel Sunday to transport Giants linebacker Lorenzo Carter and Cowboys defensive tackle Trysten Hill to safety. Now it was making a third trip midway through the third quarter.
It needed to get Dak Prescott. By the time it arrived, wide receiver Michael Gallup had already grabbed his helmet with both hands as if he had witnessed a car crash. The entire Giants defensive unit had taken a knee near their goal line, and
Giants offensive coordinator Jason Garrett had placed a consoling arm around his replacement, Mike McCarthy, before the Cowboys quarterback hopped on his left foot five or six steps to get up onto the cart. Accepting best wishes from players and coaches on both teams, Prescott couldn’t stop
the tears as he bit into a towel and then waved to the cheering crowd at AT&T Stadium.
Hello, first place; goodbye, season.
This wasn’t unthinkable because, in the world of professional football, everyone is at risk at all times. But there was an otherworldly nature to it because of all Prescott had done before getting his right ankle caught under the legs of Giants safety Logan Ryan, a play that resulted in a compound fracture that required surgery Sunday night and will surely confine him to the sidelines for the remainder of 2020.
There was no mention of this, but Sunday was Prescott’s 100th game since he last missed one with an injury — a nerve injury in his left arm suffered during his sophomore year at Mississippi State. He played in his final 28 games for the Bulldogs and, counting playoffs, this was his 72nd start for the Cowboys. The man who viewed himself as invincible in contract talks, willingly playing without long-term security in 2019 and again this season, learned that history doesn’t always dictate the future, that the roll-ofthe-dice nature of the NFL limits the health and wellbeing of the bravest and the sturdiest.
The Cowboys went on to win the game without Prescott, beating the winless Giants 37-34 to take over first place in the sad sack NFC East. They even got a couple of big pass plays from Andy Dalton,
whose mere presence represented the team’s willingness last spring to acknowledge that Prescott — like anyone else — carries a certain injury risk.
Although the fans, scattered throughout the stadium and seemingly smaller in number than last week against Cleveland, cheered the winning field goal, there was a definite sense of lost importance to the game after Prescott left. I don’t want to go so far as to call it a funeral — I covered the Daytona 500 in 2001, so I know that a season-ending injury isn’t the worst thing in the world to witness. But Prescott repre
sents so much of everything this team has done and hoped to do for the last five years.
There have been Cowboys teams in recent seasons that got lucky with injuries, but this is not one of them. Defensive tackle Gerald McCoy and linebacker Leighton Vander Esch were supposed to be cornerstones of the front seven. Tackles Tyron Smith and La’el Collins and tight end Blake Jarwin are lost for the season and center Travis Frederick retired in the spring. Cornerbacks have shuffled in and out of the lineup, but Prescott’s steady presence into his fifth season was the kind of thing Cowboys fans believed they could take for granted.
“There was a flood of emotion, even from their bench,” McCarthy said. “I could tell the way he went down it was of a serious nature. He was having a tremendous year. He made such an impression on me. He was unquestionably the leader of this team.”
Prescott led the league in yards passing by a huge margin through the first four games. People spoke of a 6,000-yard season. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing for the team since Prescott’s heavy load was a product of a Dallas defense giving up the most points in the league. But all of our mind-sets, our impressions shifted around 6 p.m. Sunday as we pondered a Cowboys season without No. 4 in the huddle.
Until the third quarter Sunday, Philly’s Carson Wentz was the guy who got hurt. Not Dak. And yet by 7 p.m., Wentz was just one of hundreds of NFL players and observers tweeting some version of “prayers up for Dak.”
Ultimately, the surprise shouldn’t be that Prescott’s leg bent in a ghastly fashion and that he was helped off the field for the first time as a professional. The surprise should be that that awful cart doesn’t make more than three trips onto the field to ferry the helpless victims of this game back to safety each week.
Prescott can remain an excellent quarterback when he returns. He’ll just never be that guy who never gets hurt any longer because, frankly, he never was.