The Dallas Cowboys have been one of the most disappointing teams of the 2024 NFL season. While Jerry Jones harbored hopes for a late-season run, that idea took a huge blow when starting quarterback Dak Prescott suffered a major injury.
Here’s the latest on Prescott and his potential return to play.
What Is Dak Prescott’s Injury?
In 2020, Prescott suffered a gruesome broken ankle in Week 5 that was very clearly a season-ender at first blush.
This year, Prescott felt something in his hamstring in the team’s Week 9 loss to the Atlanta Falcons. At the time, while it was enough to end Prescott’s day, nothing about the injury suggested it was overly severe.
“Yeah, we gotta get it looked at,” Prescott said. “Felt it on the little scramble to the left. Felt it, didn’t think much. Then on the next play, throwing that the stop route to the field, pulled something, I felt something I never felt. It was tough to walk on it at that point.
“I saw the medical team and asked, ‘Could I make it worse?’ At that point, they said I wouldn’t be able to protect myself and made the call to hold me out.”
When Will Prescott Return From Injury?
Initial reports were that Prescott would be out 3-4 weeks, and the team was mulling placing him on injured reserve (IR). Subsequent tests revealed Prescott didn’t just strain his hamstring, he suffered an avulsion — meaning it partially tore off the bone.
That’s much more significant than a typical strain and requires surgery, which Prescott had ahead of Week 11. It comes with an approximate recovery timeline of three months. Before Week 12, the Cowboys placed their quarterback on IR, ending his season.
The good news is there is nothing about this injury that has any major long-term concerns. Prescott’s broken ankle in 2020 clearly impacted his mobility the following season. This hamstring tear will be fully recovered by the start of the new league year.
The recovery timeline should allow Prescott to ramp up enough to return for offseason workouts in the spring. Once training camp rolls around, Prescott should be experiencing no adverse effects from the injury and should be all systems go for Week 1 in 2025.
How Has Prescott’s Absence Impacted the Cowboys?
With Prescott unavailable for the rest of the season, Dallas has turned to Cooper Rush to manage the offense. Dallas was clobbered in its first two games with Rush but has since reeled off a pair of division wins over the Washington Commanders and New York Giants to emerge on the far periphery of the playoff race.
Rush also took over as the starter early in 2022 when Prescott fractured the thumb on his throwing hand. The Cowboys went 4-1 that season with Rush as the starter. For his career, Rush has played in 34 games with 10 starts. He is 7-3 in those 10 starts.
The Cowboys were struggling even with Prescott, so it’s far too simple to claim that they would be a true playoff contender with a healthy Dak.
PFN’s QB+ metric, which measures QB play by a variety of situational EPA and success rate figures, graded Prescott at a 66.1 (D) grade this year. That was easily his worst since the QB+ metric began in 2019, as he had never graded below 84.5 (B) from 2019-23.
Even so, it’s obvious that none of Dallas’ remaining quarterbacks possess the type of upside that could result in a miraculous late-season surge. Other quarterbacks on the Cowboys roster include former No. 3 overall pick Trey Lance and six-year veteran Will Grier, who is on the practice squad.
The San Francisco 49ers selected Lance in the 2021 NFL Draft but then traded him to Dallas in 2023 in exchange for a 2024 fourth-round pick. He has four career starts, the most recent of which came in Week 2 of the 2022 season. Lance suffered a season-ending broken ankle in that contest, effectively ending his time with the Niners.