PRESSURE OFF THE PRESENT
Prescott’s injury provides Jones, Cowboys with a built-in excuse if season goes south
As it turns out, Dak Prescott was the perfect quarterback for Jerry Jones all along. Every time Prescott gets hurt, it gives Jones another chance to downplay the present and sell Dallas Cowboys fans on the future.
“If only we can get through the next few weeks,” those fans are telling themselves now, and it's almost like when Prescott broke his thumb last Sunday night it made everyone forget the disaster that preceded it. If he had spent this week healthy, Jones would have had to answer questions about how terrible his offense looked in an opening loss.
But when Prescott banged his hand on a Tampa Bay defender's helmet late in a 19-3 loss?
It changed the story and somehow bought Jones time.
Now, instead of answering questions about why he didn't spend the offseason getting Prescott a little help, or why the Cowboys were unable to move the ball even when Prescott was on the field, the conversation shifts to how Dallas can weather the next month or so without him.
For a franchise that has spent the last quarter century swearing that its return to greatness is just around the corner, it's almost too perfect. The Cowboys weren't going to win a Super Bowl this season regardless of how much Prescott played. But on Sunday afternoon, when they host defending AFC champion Cincinnati, they needn't worry about that.
If they lose to the Bengals, well, what did anyone expect with Cooper Rush under center?
If they win, it's a feel-good story and a big dose of optimism for a team playing without its star.
Mike McCarthy has a builtin excuse either way, and it's not unlike the dynamic of his first season as coach of the Cowboys. In 2020, Dallas started 1-3 with Prescott in the lineup, then he went down for the season with a gruesome ankle injury in the fifth game. The Cowboys went on to finish 6-10, while believing — probably correctly — that with Prescott they would have been much better.
To be sure, Prescott's not the problem. He can't block for himself, and he can't trick opposing defenses into ignoring the only established wide receiver the Cowboys had on the field against the Buccaneers. On that note, it sure would help Rush's case if CeeDee Lamb plays a little more like the No. 1 option Dallas believes him to be.
But when Jones' son Stephen, the team's executive vice president, went on a Dallas radio station this week and rejected the suggestion that Prescott is injury-prone, it was the kind of hair-splitting that the Cowboys love.
Yes, Prescott played every game of his first four seasons. And no, two strokes of bad luck do not an injury-prone quarterback make. But he missed 11 games in 2020 with that broken ankle, and he missed a game last year with a left calf strain, and before last week's thumb injury, people worried about his availability due to an ankle tweak he attributed to an ill-fitting pair of shoes.
Now he's out indefinitely, although the Cowboys refrained from placing him on injured reserve to leave open the possibility that he can return at some point during the next four games. If they can win just once or twice with Rush, winning the division should remain a possibility.
But the results of the first week suggested the rest of the NFC East might not be quite as horrendous as some expected it to be, and the details of the Cowboys' loss to Tampa Bay suggested offensive coordinator Kellen Moore's extended honeymoon might be over. When McCarthy declared this week that the staff needs “to be a little smarter” when it comes to play-calling, nobody disputed that.
Later in the week, Jerry Jones went on his 105.3 The Fan radio show in Dallas and acknowledged that if he were a fan, he'd “be mad, too.” That's when he toyed with the idea of bringing back a segment in which fans could come to him with questions.
“Those same fans know I'll never sell this team,” Jones said.
But with a team that looks no closer to a championship than it was two or 10 or 20 years ago? And a star quarterback on the sideline, raring come back from another injury?
Jones still can sell the future.
Just like he always has.