Amid all the Cowboys problems on offense, Dak Prescott’s play has been a contributor to their failures

Photo by Sam Hodde/Getty Images

There are a lot of problems with the Dallas Cowboys right now.

The Dallas Cowboys are having problems. The defense gets the brunt of the criticism because overall their performance has been worse, but injuries have put them behind the eight ball. The offense, however, has few excuses. Most of their players are healthy, yet they are not living up to expectations.

The issues are plentiful. The ground attack is a blinking red light for the offense's underwhelming play. The Cowboys rank dead last in rushing yards this season. Advanced stats show that Rico Dowdle is ranked 18th for running backs in EPA/attempt while Ezekiel Elliott is ranked 41st. This paints the picture that the Cowboys have one average running back, but as a group are near the bottom in talent.

The offensive line has been another area of concern. Entering Week 7, the Cowboys' offensive line has a pass-block win rate of 57% (ranked 19th) and a run-block win rate of 71% (18th), which tells us they are slightly below average in both departments.

The blame can continue with suspect play-calling or ineffective route-running and you would find some good and bad things in both those areas. The offense finds themselves in the worst quadrant for passing and rushing efficiency this season, but it might surprise you that the pass EPA is more below average than the run.

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How is it possible that an offense with Dak Prescott and CeeDee Lamb is having issues in the passing game? The Cowboys are third in the league in passing yards so the overall volume is high, but other factors like game script and abandoning the run affect those numbers. From an efficiency standpoint, the passing game hasn’t been good, and you may or may not be surprised to learn that Prescott’s performance has a lot to do with it.

To focus on Prescott’s play, we wanted to look at some advanced stats that reflect his performance. Looking at expected points added, Prescott’s value has taken a huge hit this season.

When we look at completion percentage over expected, we see a similar pattern.

And when we compile these two metrics together, again it paints the same picture.

These graphs tell us the following story...

• Prescott has been teetering around a top-10 quarterback for most of his career
• His play dipped some in 2018, but we can attribute that to an inadequate receiving group that featured seven games without Amari Cooper
• Dak performed extremely well last season
• Prescott is playing his worst football this year

To get a better feel for Prescott’s performance compared to other quarterbacks around the league, we’ve put together a little season-to-season visual that shows how much this year sticks out.

Here are the quarterback efficiency graphs for the last seven seasons. Dak Prescott has lived in the elite quadrant for most of his career. This is the first time he's been in the bad quadrant. While it's not all Dak's fault, we should admit that his play is part of the problem. pic.twitter.com/GG2pDNYeZX

— Dan Rogers (@DannyPhantom24) October 19, 2024

This does not paint a good picture of the team’s franchise quarterback. Feel free to slide down into the comment section and write, “They should’ve never paid him $60 million a year.” And if it gets one rec for every game Prescott has played in his career (120), we wouldn’t be surprised, however, this is not a “Dak is no good article.” It’s already been shown that he is good with the data points from last year. But this is an attempt to indicate that Prescott is not playing well this season and he’s a part of the offense's failures.

The solution is for him to just play better. It’s not looking ahead and replacing him with someone else, not because the financial implications of such a move are virtually impossible (which they are), but rather because he can and will play better than he has been.

The Cowboys have to get other things fixed on offense as well, so this isn’t all on Dak, but he owns a part of the blame and if he doesn’t turn the corner soon, this team’s offensive struggles aren’t likely to change.