The Dallas Cowboys won’t have starting quarterback Dak Prescott for the rest of the 2024 season. Prescott was officially placed on injured reserve the day of the team’s Week 11 Monday night game vs. the Houston Texans with a hamstring avulsion.
In his place, Cooper Rush is the expected starting quarterback for the remainder of the season. Below we take a look at Rush’s career to date.
Cooper Rush’s NFL Career
An undrafted free agent out of Central Michigan in 2017, Rush first joined the Cowboys during Prescott’s second NFL season. Rush played out the duration of his three-year undrafted rookie contract before being released in the 2020 offseason to make room for Andy Dalton.
Rush caught on with the New York Giants, failing to make the 2020 roster out of training camp but resided on their practice squad. However, after Prescott’s gruesome season-ending ankle injury that year, the Cowboys re-signed Rush off the Giants’ practice squad. He has been on Dallas’ roster ever since.
Throughout Rush’s NFL career, he’s 5-2 as a starter. Most notably, he filled in for Prescott when the Cowboys’ starter broke his thumb in 2022 and won in four of his five starts. Rush put the ball in the hands of Dallas’ playmakers and let them do the rest. In the process, he became the first QB in Cowboys history to win his first four career starts.
Questions arose whether the Cowboys could stay afloat until his return.
Enter: backup QB Cooper Rush.pic.twitter.com/oxBY71t6ry
— NFL (@NFL) January 16, 2023
Pro Football Network has ranked Rush as the NFL’s 15th-best backup quarterback. Monday vs. the Texans will be his second start of the season. Rush’s first start vs. the Philadelphia Eagles went poorly. The Cowboys were destroyed 34-6 and posted a ghastly -0.61 EPA per play. That was their worst mark in a game since the 2000 season finale vs. the Tennessee Titans (-0.83).
For his career, Rush has appeared in 31 games with seven starts, completing 178 of 298 passes (60%) for 1,831 yards, nine touchdowns, and six interceptions.
In 2023, Rush signed a two-year, $5 million contract to stay with the Cowboys, including a $1,250,000 signing bonus, $2,750,000 guaranteed, and an average annual salary of $2,500,000. This is the final year of that contract, meaning that this effectively serves as an audition for Rush to cash in on a far more lucrative contract in the offseason.
The free agent quarterback market is thin, and this year’s draft class does not appear to stack up against the 2024 class, which saw a record-tying six first-round quarterbacks. As it stands, the free agent quarterback class is headlined by Russell Wilson, Sam Darnold, and Justin Fields.