Jerry Jones’ Dak Prescott gamble gets fresh validation from major PFF ranking

When the Dallas Cowboys took Dak Prescott in the fourth round of the 2016 draft, the plan was not to hand him the franchise. Tony Romo was still the starter, Dallas was still trying to squeeze another run out of that era and Prescott was supposed to be a developmental pick taken at No. 135 overall.

10 years later, he has become something very different, and Pro Football Focus just put a fresh label on it.

PFF’s Bradley Locker recently named Prescott the NFL’s best non-first-round pick since 2016, a list that cuts straight to how unusual his career has been. Locker pointed to Prescott’s consistency, noting that he has produced six seasons with at least an 80.0 overall PFF grade. He ranks sixth in PFF WAR since entering the league and has piled up 236 big-time throws, the seventh-most in that span.

Locker’s larger point was simple. Whatever the playoff frustrations have become, Dallas turning a fourth-round flyer into a decade-long franchise quarterback is still one of the better draft success stories of the last ten years.

That is the part of Prescott’s story that can get lost because of everything that came after it. The Cowboys spent years with rare quarterback stability while the rest of the NFC East cycled through starter after starter, and Jerry Jones treated Prescott like the kind of player you do not let leave the building.

He made him the NFL’s first $40 million-per-year player in 2021, then doubled down with the four-year, $240 million extension that briefly pushed him to $60 million annually, another league first at the time. Jones later explained that decision in blunt terms, saying Prescott was “indispensable.”

Of course, that is also why the pressure has never eased. Prescott’s rise from afterthought to franchise cornerstone is real, and PFF is right to frame it as a draft win.

But when a quarterback gets paid as Prescott has, the story never ends with where he was picked. It ends with whether he can finally drag Dallas somewhere it has not been in three decades.

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