Coming off one of the best seasons of his career, Prescott was in the MVP discussion, but it appears that counts for nothing.
You will be hard-pressed to find an NFL player who divides opinion as much as Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott.
Either he's a top quarterback or he's not. There's no inbetween.
Coming off a superb 2025 season, despite the 7-9 record, Dak threw for 4,552 yards, 30 TDs, and just 10 interceptions as he once again orchestrated one of the best offenses in football.
But that's last year, what can we expect from Dak in 2026?
At this time of the offseason, lists are being compiled, and Fox Sports' Colin Cowherd has done his top 10 quarterbacks entering the 2026 season.
Now, of course, these sorts of lists are subjective, but that doesn't mean we can't pick them apart.
For Cowherd, he has criteria that he used to make this list, and that is production, durability and momentum.
So, who are Colins' top 10 quarterbacks entering the 2026 season?
- Josh Allen
- Patrick Mahomes,
- Caleb Williams
- Justin Herbert
- Matthew Stafford
- Joe Burrow
- Lamar Jackson
- Drake Maye
- Jared Goff
- Sam Darnold
The players who missed? Dak Prescott, Trevor Lawrence, and Jalen Hurts.
Plus, how can you have Stafford, the MVP of the league, at No. 5 and below Herbert, Williams, and Mahomes?? That's laughable for me.
So, let's make a case for Dak.
Firstly, you could argue that Prescott has the production, durability, and momentum stemming from the 2025 season to be high on this list. Really high.
Then there's Justin Herbert.
For some reason, the love for Herbert is incredible, despite him never really having amounted to anything substantial... yet.
You can't have him above Dak right now, can you? In fact you could make the case for him not being in the top 10 at all.
To have him above Stafford, who is coming off an MVP season, and Darnold, who just won the Super Bowl, Cowherd is missing two elements of his own criteria: production and momentum.
Again, if we are basing it on 2025.
You could make the case that Mahomes shouldn't be as high, nor should Lamar. Of course, we know they are among the best in football, but going by Cowherd's criteria, and if it's based on 2025, they can't be that high, can they?
Granted, I don't know whether Cowherd is basing his list on players' entire careers or just the 2025 season, but in my mind, Prescott has to be on it. He just has to.
Last season, Dak was third in yards (4,552), fourth in touchdowns (30), fifth in completion percentage among quarterbacks who played all 17 games (67.3), 10th in passer rating (99.5; also Burrow and Brock Purdy had higher passer ratings but played eight and nine games respectively), and fifth in QBR (70.2).
So that's a good season by any metric you want to use. Yes, the 7-9-1 record is what drags Dak down.
But then, if we do it over the course of his career, since 2016, when Dak was drafted, he's fifth in wins (83), fourth in yards (35,989), seventh in touchdowns (243), and sixth in interceptions (92, with Allen, Stafford, Goff all ahead of him for the "interceptions are in his DNA" crowd).
Yes, I'd have Allen, Stafford, Maye, Darnold, and maybe Goff above Prescott based purely on the form of the 2025 season, but you can easily make the case for Dak to be above every other quarterback on that list entering 2026.
Is Dak being disrespected? You can definitely make that case.
But again, that's nothing new, right?