Where the Dak Prescott MVP Case is Lacking

If the NFL MVP award is about narratives as much as it is about performance, then Dak Prescott and the Cowboys are writing one that measures up to the veteran quarterback’s productivity on the field.  After handshake Week 1 and 2 blowouts of a pair of overmatched New York teams — the latter reeling from their new star quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ season-ending Achilles injury — the Cowboys stumbled.  They lost to a Cardinals team that remains a virtual lock for a top-five draft pick. They lost badly to a 49ers team that the Cowboys presumedly saw as their peer on a short list of NFC title contenders. And they lost to the rival Eagles and fell two and a half games behind them in the race for the NFC East crown.

But then the Cowboys found their footing.  They have won five straight games.  They have scored 33 or more points in five straight games.  And with their 20-point revenge win over the Eagles last Sunday night, the Cowboys have erased their East division deficit.  They may need an extra win in the final month because of a conference-wins tiebreaker that still favors the Eagles.  But Prescott and the Cowboys are on that trajectory and seemed poised to punctuate the former’s MVP candidacy as the hottest team in football as the calendar turns to January.

It is a compelling narrative.  But it is not the only read of the ups and downs of this Cowboys season.

Prescott and the Cowboys have played dramatically better at home than on the road this year.  Prescott has completed 74.0% of his passes at home but just 63.5% on the road.  He’s averaged 8.5 yards per attempt at home but just 6.8 on the road.  And he’s thrown 20 touchdowns versus 2 interceptions at home but just 8 touchdowns versus 4 interceptions on the road.  The Cowboys lost all three of those early-season Cardinals, 49ers, and Eagles games on the road.  And they won four of the five games in their current winning streak and produced the bulk of their recent offensive fireworks at home in Dallas.

It isn’t inherently a problem that Prescott has played his best at home this season.  The randomness of a short NFL season assures that some players will perform much better at home and some will perform much better on the road.  And Prescott’s seven wins in as many games at home still count, and they will carry the Cowboys to the No. 1 seed if they can jump the 49ers and Eagles these next four weeks.  But modern MVP voters have overwhelmingly supported quarterbacks with standout home and road productivity.  And Prescott’s consistent and extreme home/road splits beg a question of whether his perceived contributions are entirely his own.

Quarterbacks have won the last 10 MVP awards.  And nine of those 10 MVP quarterbacks have mirrored a top-three ranking in DYAR per game — an estimate of a quarterback’s total value contributed per game — with top-four rankings at home and on the road.

Prescott meets that top-three overall standard with 93 DYAR per game this season, a rate that just misses the 96-153 range of the bulk of the recent MVP winners and lands him between the most productive of his most likely award competitors, Brock Purdy (117) and Patrick Mahomes (88).  And he meets the top-four home standard with 146 DYAR per game there, a rate that just misses Peyton Manning’s gold-medal rate from the previous decade (151) and Purdy’s otherwise outlier rate this season (150).  But Prescott falls dramatically short of the top-four road standard with just 32 DYAR per game outside of Dallas.  And in fact, his road DYAR per game is less than half that of all but one of the last 10 MVP winners and his top 2023 competitors, Purdy (88) and Mahomes (75).

Prescott’s home/road split might not matter if it was a product of randomness.  But that is a difficult case to argue.  Prescott carries a still-severe 57-DYAR-per-game advantage at home over the last three seasons.  Purdy and Mahomes have near-neutral splits of 15 more and 9 less DYAR per game at home in that time.  And while he has a marked home/road split in 2023, too, Lamar Jackson has averaged 2 fewer DYAR at home over the larger sample of the last three seasons.

Prescott missed most of the 2020 season with an ankle injury.  But in six of his seven healthy seasons, he has averaged at least 27 more DYAR per game at home than on the road.

Maybe Prescott has tossed a quarter seven times and seen it land heads on six of them — or rather, maybe he has tossed a quarter the 110 times he’s played a regular-season NFL game and seen it land heads a much higher rate at home than on the road.  But I contend it is more plausible that Prescott and the Cowboys enjoy some benefit from playing at home — perhaps because of a home dome stadium, which none of his most likely award competitors Purdy, Mahomes, Jackson, or Hurts has.  And if Prescott sees some home benefit, then voters should try — and seemingly have in the modern era tried — to evaluate him separate from that benefit.

To the extent that he cares about an individual award, Prescott shouldn’t stress a questioning of his value to his team.  The schedule quirk that I speculated set up a possibly undeserving MVP narrative also offers Prescott a chance to respond.  The Cowboys play three of their final four games on the road.  If he wants to erase any doubts, then Prescott needs simply to travel to Buffalo and Miami and continue to excel the way he has in Dallas.