One of the most persistent hot takes about Dak Prescott is that he pads his stats against weak teams and underperforms against quality teams, because he can’t win the big games.
If you look deeper at the root of this particular meme, you’ll quickly find that it’s more than just sloppy thinking and lazy research that leads people down this erroneous path. This storyline lives on in social media, message board, and messenger apps like a ghoul from the Walking Dead stuck in a swamp somewhere in Georgia, and is largely based on a particularly twisted piece of post-rationalization that seems to be very particular to Cowboys Nation:
Prescott can’t win big games, because it’s only a big game if the Cowboys lose. If the Cowboys win, it can’t have been a big game because “they should have won that one anyway.”
Irrefutable fact or vicious slander? Today, we set the stat hounds loose to sniff out what’s what as we slice and dice Prescott’s performance against better and lesser opponents.
Let’s do away with the stat-padding story right away. Since the league moved to a 14-team playoff field in 2021, Prescott’s career passer rating against playoff teams is 99.0, the third best among QBs with at least 10 starts over that period.
| Passer Rating vs. Playoff Teams, 2021-2025 | |||||||||
| Rk | Player | G | Rate | ||||||
| 1 | Lamar Jackson | 32 | 104.9 | ||||||
| 2 | Joe Burrow | 30 | 103.6 | ||||||
| 3 | Dak Prescott | 29 | 99.0 | ||||||
| 4 | Brock Purdy | 21 | 97.0 | ||||||
| 5 | Josh Allen | 28 | 95.7 | ||||||
| 6 | Jared Goff | 38 | 95.4 | ||||||
| 7 | Matthew Stafford | 31 | 94.8 | ||||||
| 8 | Jacoby Brissett | 15 | 94.5 | ||||||
| 9 | Patrick Mahomes | 37 | 93.9 | ||||||
| 10 | Kirk Cousins | 27 | 93.2 | ||||||
| 11 | Bo Nix | 13 | 92.8 | ||||||
| 12 | Justin Herbert | 33 | 92.0 | ||||||
| 13 | Jordan Love | 20 | 91.8 | ||||||
| 14 | Baker Mayfield | 34 | 91.4 | ||||||
| 15 | Geno Smith | 30 | 90.7 | ||||||
| Source: ProFootballReference, min 10 starts | |||||||||
So put that story to bed right now.
Prescott’s 99.0 passer rating against playoff teams is only marginally lower than his 99.3 passer rating against all teams (playoff-bound or not) since 2021. Against playoff teams, Prescott plays at practically the same (extremely high) level as he does against lesser opponents.
That becomes even more obvious when you look at the 2025 NFL averages. The NFL average passer rating last year was 91.4. Against playoff teams, the average was 85.8, a drop of -5.6 points. Compared to that, Prescott’s rating only drops by -0.3, so not only is he playing better against playoff teams than most other QBs, his performance drop is also much lower against playoff teams than for other QBs. .
A closer look at the splits by opponent wins in the table below shows that Prescott does have slightly better numbers against the truly terrible teams. But which QB doesn’t? Here’s Prescott’s full breakdown by opponent wins, split into four roughly equal-sized quartiles.
| Dak Prescott Passer Rating, 2021-2025 | ||||||||||||
| Opp. Wins | Games | CMP | ATT | YDS | CMP% | YPA | TD | INT | Passer Rating | NFL Avg. 2025 | Difference | |
| 11+ | 18 | 437 | 665 | 4,780 | 0.66 | 7.2 | 28 | 16 | 90.8 | 81.1 | +9.7 | |
| 9-10 | 15 | 390 | 542 | 4,496 | 0.72 | 8.3 | 33 | 12 | 107.7 | 88.9 | +18.8 | |
| 6-8 | 15 | 342 | 533 | 3,637 | 0.64 | 6.8 | 29 | 13 | 92.0 | 92.8 | -0.9 | |
| 0-5 | 22 | 501 | 726 | 5,442 | 0.69 | 7.5 | 47 | 11 | 106.1 | 99.5 | +6.6 | |
| Total | 70 | 1,670 | 2,466 | 18,355 | 0.68 | 7.4 | 137 | 52 | 99.3 | 91.4 | +7.9 | |
Versus the NFL average, Prescott handily outperforms every win bracket, with one notable exception: we see a significant drop-off against teams that finished the season between 6 and 8 wins. Of course, when we look at Prescott’s 92.0 passer rating against 6-to-8-win teams and call it a “significant drop-off”, keep in mind that we are talking about a level of performance that other QBs like (and I’ll just grab a few random names out of the hat here) Baker Mayfield (91.2), Caleb “Iceman” Williams (89.0), Daniel Jones (86.6), Trevor Lawrence (86.3), or Eli Manning himself (84.1) haven’t managed to achieve over their entire careers. Context. Always good for some perspective.
But the drop-off is still intriguing, and a little digging shows a curious pattern specifically in away games.
| Dak Prescott passer rating by location and opponent wins, 2021-2025 | |||||||||
| Opp. Wins | Home Games Passer Rating | Away Games Passer Rating | Difference | ||||||
| 11+ | 98.3 | 84.7 | -13.6 | ||||||
| 9-10 | 113.8 | 101.2 | -12.7 | ||||||
| 6-8 | 105.9 | 79.6 | -26.3 | ||||||
| 0-5 | 104.9 | 107.4 | +2.6 | ||||||
| Total | 105.5 | 93.3 | -12.2 | ||||||
In eight away games against teams with 6-8 wins, Prescott had his three worst games (per passer rating) against NFC East teams.
- 2021, Week 14 @ Washington (7-10): 58.8 passer rating. Cowboys win 27-10.
- 2022, Week 18 @ Washington (8-9): 45.8 passer rating. Cowboys lose 6-26.
- 2023, Week 1 @ New York (6-11): 72.0 passer rating. Cowboys win 40-0.
Without those three games, Prescott would have a comfortable passer rating of 91.9 in that tier instead of the 79.6 we see in the table. But those games happened. Are they big games? Hardly.
The other constant to Prescott’s game these stats don’t show is that he’s been playing behind some highly suspect offensive lines for a couple of years now. PFF.com publishes annual offensive line rankings. And after leading the ranking in 2021, the Cowboys have dropped into the 20s the last two years.
| Dallas Cowboys O-line ranking, 2021-2025 | |||||||||
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |||||
| 1st | 12th | 6th | 25th | 21st | |||||
| Source: PFF.com | |||||||||
Yet over those five years, Prescott’s passer rating is 99.3, sixth best in the league. And one reason for that is Prescott is pretty good under pressure. PFF just ranked Prescott as the most clutch quarterback of the 2025 NFL season, and point out that he’s been clutch for a while now.
Prescott earned an 87.8 passing grade in clutch situations in 2025, the second-highest mark of his career and nearly 10 grading points better than his previous best (78.3 in 2021).
The Cowboys quarterback recorded nine big-time throws against just four turnover-worthy plays while averaging 8.1 yards per attempt. More importantly, he consistently stacked positive plays, earning a positive grade on 31.2% of his snaps, the fifth-highest rate among 43 qualifiers.
Prescott has now cleared a 70.0 grade in clutch situations in six of his 10 qualifying seasons, giving him a stronger long-term track record in these situations than his public reputation often suggests [emphasis added].
And ftnfantasy.com, something like the Football Outsiders successor, comes to a very similar conclusion: Under pressure, Prescott ranks second overall in DVOA under pressure.
We’ve seen that Prescott ranks third overall in passer rating against playoff teams, we’ve also seen that he outperforms against teams with winning records. We have data that shows how good he is under pressure. None of this squares with the narratives about stat-padding, weakness under pressure, or not performing against quality opponents.
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