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It's the offseason! Except when it comes to dynasty leagues, there is no offseason.
We'll be spending some time this year thinking about how to value individual players in dynasty in our Dynasty Price Check series. What's a player's current value? Should you trade them or trade for them? Are they being overvalued or undervalued by dynasty players?
Today, we'll be looking at Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott.
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Dak Prescott Background
I'm going to try to not talk too much about the whole "should Dallas offer a huge contract to Dak" thing, because I firmly believe the answer is yes and am operating under the belief that Dallas and Dak will work out a deal. Apologies to all the sports radio callers here in DFW who dislike Dak and think Dallas needs to move on. Dak's good. Dallas will work something out. Let's move on with an understanding of both of those things.
Dak was off to a stellar start in 2020 before an ankle injury ended his season. In basically 4.5 games, Prescott completed 68 percent of his passes with nine touchdowns and was averaging 371.2 yards per game, a number that includes the game he was injured in which he played two-thirds of the snaps. No quarterback averaged more fantasy points per game than Prescott.
2021 will be Prescott's sixth NFL season. He's clearly the best quarterback from that 2016 draft class and while he had some rough spots in his career -- specifically the year 2017, when he completed 62.9 percent of his passes -- his arrow has been pointed firmly up the past few years. Prescott is a very, very good NFL quarterback and barring a catastrophic injury -- and yes, maybe the ankle injury he suffered last year will be that injury, though I doubt it -- he's got a long career ahead of him.
Dynasty Outlook
The question with Dak isn't whether or not he's a good dynasty option; it's how high should we have Dak in our dynasty rankings.
An interesting place to start is to see where other people have him, like our very own Brandon Murchison, who recently published his early 2021 dynasty QB preview article here at RotoBaller.
And where did Brandon have Dak?
QB2! That's high!
If you look at the overall dynasty rankings at FantasyPros, Dak averages out to QB5 behind Patrick Mahomes, Kyler Murray, Josh Allen, and Deshaun Watson. But Watson comes with a ton of uncertainty at this point, as he's demanded a trade from Houston and Houston doesn't seem in the mood to trade him.
The biggest thing going in Dak's favor is that the Cowboys offense with Dak looked incredible from a fantasy perspective, and the team's seemingly unending defensive issues will keep Dak throwing the ball. Dallas surrounded him with a lot of playmaking receivers, and the emergence of Tony Pollard out of the backfield adds another weapon to go along with Ezekiel Elliott, who I wrote a dynasty piece over recently.
Mike McCarthy gets a lot of dirt thrown his way, but over those first five games, he'd pretty clearly crafted a gameplan that maximized Dak's numbers. The Cowboys aren't moving on from McCarthy any time soon (probably), so Dak gets that as another big plus.
Still, I don't think I'd put him at QB2 in my personal rankings. Mahomes is obviously higher than him, and then I think the rushing upside of Murray and Allen would put them as my two and three. I'd pencil Prescott in as my dynasty QB4 right now.
QB4 is good, though! He's in that upper tier of dynasty passers who can do a lot of good for your team. He's still young. He's in a pass-happy offense. We've seen enough of him to know this isn't a fluke. But he's also a little older than Murray and Allen, which I think matters at least a little bit in dynasty, even if age matters much less at quarterback than at any other position.
What's He Worth?
What should you do to get Dak on your team? Should you sell high on him?
It depends a lot on your league settings.
In a single-QB dynasty league, having a top quarterback is important -- more so than it is in re-draft, in my opinion -- but it also isn't the be-all, end-all of things. If you can get massive value for a top QB and have someone you can slide in who'll give you solid production in their place, you have to consider doing it.
I would say that if I rostered Dak, I'd be less willing to trade him for young players and/or picks than I would be to trade him for established talent.
There are people who would probably tell you to trade Dak for something like the 1.04 in a one-QB league. You could do that, but a team with Dak at QB is a team that always has a chance of winning now. I wouldn't give that away for a lottery pick.
Instead, I'd give it away in a deal that got me an immediate contributor or two, especially if I had a low-end QB1 or a couple QB2 options on my bench. In that case, I think you can trade Dak.
In a Superflex league, I'd be really, really hesitant to move on from Dak unless I was about to do a full-on rebuild. In that case, you could probably grab a couple of firsts for him, which could definitely help spark a rebuilding phase. But you'd really, really need to be confident you weren't a competitive team or be really, really confident in the return you get if you're actually moving Dak.
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