Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott suffered a horrific ankle injury in Dallas’ 34-31 win over the New York Giants on Sunday and will miss the rest of the season. But make no mistake: the Cowboys believe that Prescott is still their franchise quarterback moving forward.
“Absolutely,” former Cowboys quarterback and current radio analyst Danny White said on The Zach Gelb Show. “Dak’s been one of the most durable players in the league. He started every game since he became the starter for the last four years, so this is so uncharacteristic of Dak. This was a fluke deal. This was not Dak spraining his ankle for the fifth time or something like that. Everyone knows that Dak is durable, he’s built like a linebacker, takes great care of himself – but these kind of things happen in the game of football.
“So I don’t think it hurts his position at all in terms of his long-term contract,” White continued. “He’s guaranteed the $31 million that he’s going to get paid this year, and now he’s got all of Cowboy Nation in his corner. Sympathy is a powerful emotion, and I think the Cowboys would be ill-advised to try to do anything short of giving Dak what he would have gotten anyway. I think it’s a good thing in terms of his contract. He’s the kind of guy that these kind of things will just make him stronger, make him a better quarterback if nothing else. That’s the kind of guy that Dak is.”
Prescott and the Cowboys were unable to reach a long-term deal this past offseason. Then Prescott opened the 2020 season on a historic pace, throwing for 1,690 yards through four games. That’s a 6,760-yard pace, which would have shattered Peyton Manning’s all-time record of 5,477.
White does not know if Prescott will get a long-term deal next offseason or not, but he believes it will come eventually.
“That’s still completely up in the air, and so many things go into that,” White said. “The other players that they have to sign, what they have left under the salary cap – all those things enter into what their long-term decision is. They can’t do anything until the season is over anyway. I think what Jerry and Stephen [Jones] will do is they’ll watch the rest of the season, see what happens, there’s no rush to do anything right now. But I have no idea whether it’ll be the franchise tag again or give him a [long-term deal]. If I were a betting man, I would think they would sign him to a long-term deal [next offseason].”