What Jason Garrett Learned from Cowboys Rookie QB Dak Prescott in 2016

Rich wanted the story. Jason Garrett had just mentioned that he used to tell players stories to coach them up or hand them perspective, so the follow-up wrote itself: what did he tell Dak Prescott in 2016, when a fourth-round rookie was suddenly thrust to the front of everything in Dallas?

Garrett flipped the question around before he answered it.

"I probably learned as much from him that he learned from us," Garrett told the show.

Start with what the Cowboys thought they were getting. Garrett was clear that the belief was there from the moment they drafted him. "My thought when we drafted him was, hey, this guy can be the next quarterback of the Cowboys. There's no doubt in my mind about that."

The concern was timeline, not talent. Prescott had been a gun quarterback at Mississippi State with a lot of quarterback runs in his game, and Dallas worked under center as well as in the gun and did things he hadn't done in school. Garrett expected a transition period.

The transition period got canceled. Kellen Moore got hurt. Tony Romo got hurt. Prescott got thrown into it, the Cowboys lost the first game, and then they won 11 in a row.

About eight weeks into that stretch, Garrett went looking for the mechanism.

"I remember asking him, I said, Dak, how are you doing this? How are you getting these guys to play for you?" Garrett said. The guys on the team absolutely loved playing for the rookie, and it was obvious in how they played. What Garrett couldn't locate was the usual evidence. No speeches. No hollering. None of the things you anticipate leaders doing.

Prescott's answer was the opposite of a rah-rah answer.

"No coach, I can't do that," Garrett recalled him saying. "The biggest thing I've tried to do is develop relationships with the guys."

Prescott told him it was easier on the offensive side of the ball and more difficult on the defensive side, so he went and found the defensive players where they were. He played chess with some of them.

And then there's the racket.

Garrett described sitting in staff meetings on the second floor of the building, three or four hours after practice, hearing noise come up from the locker room. He'd go down to ask what the hell was going on in there. What was going on in there was 15 or 20 guys playing hamper basketball with a giant tennis ball, bouncing it into a laundry hamper.

"Prescott was the guy kind of engineering the whole thing," Garrett said.

That's the story, and the moral belongs to the rookie rather than the head coach. Garrett's summary of what Prescott told him is worth writing down somewhere: "I have to develop relationships with these guys. I have to take time with them. And once you develop that relationship, that's when they want to play for you."

"To me, that was a great lesson that I learned from a rookie quarterback," Garrett said.