Dak Prescott won 13 games and offensive rookie of the year honors last season. The Cowboys quarterback doesn’t consider that a victory, though.
The Cowboys, despite having home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs, lost to the Packers in the divisional round. The franchise has not reached the NFC Championship Game since the 1995 season, when Prescott was only 2 years old.
“It wasn’t a win,” Prescott told Mike Florio on PFT Live on Wednesday. “To me, a season is only qualified as a win if you win that last game. That’s what the Patriots were. They were the one winners of this past season. For me, it was a good start. For the team, it was a good start with young guys coming in, but it’s not where we want to be. We want to be playing in that last game of the season. We know what it takes to get there, and that’s what we’ve done this offseason is work our tails off to try to put ourselves in that position.”
Tony Romo ended his 14-year career with most of the team’s all-time passing records, but the criticism that dogs him is his inability to get the Cowboys a Super Bowl title. Romo went 78-49 in the regular season but only 2-4 in the post season. A franchise with two Super Bowl-winning, Hall-of-Fame quarterbacks in Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman places great expectations on the shoulder of its signal caller.
Prescott embraces those expectations, seconding the notion that quarterbacks should be judged by titles.
“Winning games and winning those playoff games and winning championship games,” Prescott said. ". . . At the end of the day, you can break as many records as you want; you win a lot of games at the quarterback position, throw for a lot of yards. It honestly means nothing if you don’t have a championship, if you don’t bring home a championship. It’s tough. It’s nothing easy about that. It’s not easy to do that by any means, but at the end of the day, I feel like that’s what the quarterback is judged on is how many championships did he win and how many times did he give his team chances to win those big-time games.”