SEATTLE—The 80-year-old owner of the Dallas Cowboys stood outside their locker room Saturday evening before their preseason game against Seattle. Blue suit, light blue shirt, black dress shoes, Cowboy pin in the lapel. Classic Jerry Jones. The game has aged Jones, but his zeal for the game, even after 27 years of never reaching the NFC title game, never mind winning a fourth Super Bowl, is precisely the same as it’s been since he bought the franchise in 1989. He wants it, wants it bad, and thinks this team, after two straight 12-win seasons, is fit to win it all.
But he thinks that every year.
The difference, maybe, with Jerry Jones, is he’s unwilling to call a 12-5 season a failure.
“I know how hard it is to win one of those (a Super Bowl),” Jones said, straining a bit to be heard over the cacophonous music and the Cowboys fans shouting for him in the southeast end zone. “You shouldn’t give up the ghost because you fall short in a highly competitive league. Just because we haven’t won it in so long doesn’t make what we’ve done meaningless. And I think this year we’re in better position to win it than we have been in years. We have the team, and we have the quarterback.”
Dak Prescott’s become a bit of a lightning rod entering his eighth year. The last two have ended with Prescott falling short in huge moments down the stretch of playoff losses. First the ill-fated Prescott scramble as the clock ran out to lose to the Niners two seasons ago. Then the terrible 48-second series in the final three minutes at San Francisco last year: the dropped Dre Greenlaw interception on first down, the misfire incompletion from Prescott to Michael Gallup on second down, a frustrating sack on third down, punt. Three plays, zero yards. Season over.
I told Jones what I wrote after the game: “Those are 48 seconds of Jerry Jones’ life he’ll never get back.”
“I can live with those circumstances,” Jones said. “Those 48 seconds … I truly believe if we won that day we could have won the Super Bowl.”
“Still trust Dak to win the Super Bowl here?”
“Very much. Very much. We’re relying on him, and I feel very good about that. His preparation, his presence, how the team responds to him. I believe he will get us there.”
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There are few people in football I admire more than Dak Prescott. His speech after winning the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year award last year, crediting his late mother for all the good in his life, was the best and most sincere Payton speech I’ve heard. He’s the guy you want leading your team, and his regular-season performance mirrors his impact: a 97.8 career rating, 67-percent accuracy, just 36 losses in 97 starts.
But to join the Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman on the pantheon of great America’s Team quarterbacks, and to win the first Dallas Super Bowl since 1995, Prescott has to play better in the biggest moments.
I asked him about that drive against San Francisco, those 48 seconds. The Cowboys won’t admit it, but I’m pretty sure that drive was the capper for the decision to dump offensive coordinator Kellen Moore so head coach Mike McCarthy could take play-calling and full gameplan duties. Jones told me when he hired McCarthy that he wanted to be game-planner and play-caller.
“I think you have to use your scars in that sense,” Prescott told me. “To say I’m continuing to relive it, it’s past me at this point. But a lot of the offseason was about that. With Mike taking over the play-calling we went into details and sometimes there’s those three plays—there’s a lot of details in that that allowed those three plays to not be successful. That’s what we really focused on this training camp and this spring, cleaning that up and making sure receivers are on the same page, linemen are on the same page with my [pass] drops and receivers understand where they’ve gotta be and when—so the operation just goes a whole lot smoother. We’re using the things that hurt us last year. That’ll be our strength this year.”
The Dallas offense could try to run faster this year, so Prescott can put more pressure on defenses; the acquisition of deep threat Brandin Cooks should help that. But the Cowboys were not a plodding team in 2022. Their 65.5 average offensive snaps per game were more than offensive powerhouses Kansas City (64.4), Cincinnati (61.9) and Buffalo (61.0). McCarthy’s going to have enduring faith in Prescott to play up-tempo, given Dallas’ clear desire to cut down on Prescott’s 15 picks in 2022.
Dallas is 5-12 in the postseason since the last Super Bowl win 28 years ago. Prescott wears a piece of that—he’s 2-4 in the postseason—and as he enters the first season of his thirties, he knows the focus is on those two playoff wins in seven years.
“Yeah,” he said. “A thousand percent. I want to win the Super Bowl. The only way to do that is to win playoff games. Those two wins aren’t going to be enough. It’s about stringing three or four together to make sure that we’re playing in the Super Bowl and winning what we hold as our expectations and what all these fans have as our expectations. That’s the standard when you wear this star. It’s a high standard but we love it. We embrace it.”
But it can be suffocating too. You don’t have a lot of chances like Prescott has now, entering a season as one of three NFC teams (with the Eagles and 49ers) with the best chance to make the Super Bowl. The chances are fleeting.
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.
