Small sample sizes have some people excited that Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott is headed for a big season. He’s 9-of-9 through two preseason games, which has many favorably projecting how far a quarterback who won 32 of 48 regular season games in his first three seasons can take the team in 2019.
But you can tell more from larger samples than from a handful of preseason snaps.
Prescott looked like a top-10 quarterback in his first season in the league, finishing eighth in our Total Points per 1,000 Snaps metric (click here to learn more about this stat). But he has not replicated that production the last two seasons, ranking 20th and 26th. He’s just not there with other franchise quarterbacks.
What are the things to watch for Prescott to both move up the quarterback rankings and get the Cowboys to the Conference Championship or Super Bowl?
Amari Cooper and the Deep Ball
Prescott was a different quarterback and the Cowboys were a better team once wide receiver Amari Cooper was acquired prior to Week 9 last season. Cooper had 53 receptions in nine games, including six touchdowns. He caught 70% of his targets, including 16-of-17 in a two-game stretch featuring wins over the Redskins and Saints.
A Week 14 overtime win against the Eagles was the ultimate version of the Prescott-Cooper tandem, with the two connecting for 217 yards and three touchdowns.
Cooper had three receptions on four targets on passes thrown at least 20 yards downfield, including two touchdowns in that game. That’s notable because Prescott and Cooper had only one other completion on eight passes thrown that length in their eight other games last season.
Cooper has shown in the past he can make catches on throws that far downfield. Just look back to his 2016 when he caught 11-of-19 for the Raiders.
In this NFL, it is very hard to be a great quarterback if you don’t do well on your deep throws (unless you’re Tom Brady). Let’s put that in graphic form.
The blue dots in this graph represent how accurate Drew Brees, Jared Goff, Philip Rivers, Russell Wilson, Matt Ryan, Aaron Rodgers, Andrew Luck, Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, and Patrick Mahomes were on deep throws and how often they threw the ball deep.
The gray dots are every other quarterback with at least 25 deep throws last season. The orange dot is Prescott, who has some ground to make up to catch up to those other quarterbacks.
Prescott’s deep passes were catchable 42% of the time last season. But imagine if he were just a little better. You don’t have to imagine. You saw it in the Eagles game. And he’s been better in the past. His catchable deep throw rate was 50% in his rookie season. The potential is there for both quarterback and top receiver.
Using His Legs
Prescott was sacked 56 times last season, one fewer time than he was sacked in 2016 and 2017 combined. There were too many instances in which Prescott sat back and took the sack or the pressure came too quickly for him to get away.
The Cowboys offensive line was depleted by injuries, but you can’t pin it all on that. The team’s blown block rate was better than league average. There were also 12 coverage sacks of Prescott last season compared to six in his first two seasons combined.
The Cowboys will get All-Pro center Travis Frederick back after he missed the season due to Guillain-Barre syndrome. It will also be on Prescott to be better about avoiding hits.
Prescott’s pass attempts from outside the pocket went from 81 and 76 in his first two seasons to 47 last year. Being able to complete passes out of the pocket was an important aspect of his success in his rookie season. He completed 59% of his passes outside the pocket then, 54% in 2018, and 49% last season. He had 14.8 Points Earned on pass attempts on those passes as a rookie but only 4.4 last season.
Additionally. Prescott totaled 12 rushes for four yards in the final four games of the season. He did have six rushes for 29 yards against the Seahawks in the Wild Card round but had only three rushes for two yards in a loss to the Rams in the Divisional Round. Those last six games were not very Prescott-like.
Perhaps coincidentally, Prescott pulled back on scrambling once the Cowboys got Cooper. He scrambled 20 times in the first seven weeks of the season, but only nine times the rest of the season. He was sacked 33 times in those last nine games.
New guy in the slot
Former Cowboys and now Bills slot receiver Cole Beasley took a little swipe at the Cowboys on his way out the door. “A receiver in this offense is way more important than it was in my last offense,” Beasley told The Athletic in comparing Buffalo and Dallas in June.
In 2018, Prescott threw to his slot receivers the least often of his three seasons in the NFL. However, when he did, his plays had a positive percentage of 59%, the eighth-highest rate in the league (positive percentage defined as plays with a positive Expected Points added value). So maybe there are more opportunities to be had there.
Prescott’s new primary slot option is former Packers receiver Randall Cobb, who signed with the Cowboys this past offseason. Cobb missed seven games last season, six due to a hamstring injury, the other to a concussion. He’s been a slight drop-off from Beasley in overall production the past three seasons.
Beasley vs Cobb – 2016 to 2018
