It’s An Odd-Numbered Year. Dak Prescott Is Dominating Again.

Dak’s latest career oscillation is peaking, and he’s playing at an MVP level. But it still might not be enough to save the Cowboys.

Dak Prescott of the Dallas Cowboys participates in warmups prior to a game against the Washington Commanders at AT&T Stadium on October 19, 2025. (Stacy Revere/Getty Images)

Few NFL quarterbacks have had a weirder career than Dak Prescott. What started as the underdog story of a fourth-round draft pick who became an instant starter for America’s Team — supplanting Tony Romo and leading the Cowboys to the playoffs with what was tied for the best record (13-3) in franchise history — has turned into a tale of playoff disappointment, missed opportunities, injuries and a contract that looms over everything. With the league’s largest cap hit of roughly $60 million per year, Prescott is paid like the game’s top superstar, but also judged by critics accordingly when he and his team don’t measure up.

And yet, here Prescott is again in 2025, playing some of the best football of his career — lifting a defensively-challenged Dallas team into shootouts what feels like every week and doing his best to keep the Cowboys in the playoff picture. Dak currently ranks second in my EPA value over replacement stat, trailing only Patrick Mahomes among QBs, and he sits fifth in Polymarket’s NFL MVP odds with a 9 percent chance to win the award:

That’s a big improvement over his injury-marred disaster of a 2024, and if it were another player — like his former NFC East rival Daniel Jones, who is also trending way up in performance this season — we’d be hailing Prescott as one of the league’s most inspiring bounce-back stories.

But Prescott has developed an strange pattern in his career that we’ve grown kind of accustomed to by now. Aside from his excellent initial rookie-breakout campaign of 2016, Dak’s performance has taken on a consistent inconsistency in which periods of elite play in odd years are followed by injuries or simply down performances in even ones… before the pendulum swings back to the positive side the next season. So 2025 was right on schedule for one of his patented upswings.

Just look at this chart of his yearly value over both average and replacement per 17 team games, which bears a striking resemblance to a seismograph: