Who deserves the blame for how bad the Cowboys are this season?

This is less blame on Dak than a revelation in his absence. It’s also reverse blame because Dak deserves better.

Let’s be clear, no one blames Dak for getting hurt. No one should blame Dak for getting injured. If anything, Dak was a victim of the Cowboys putting such a putrid team around him that he needed to put himself in a situation where he was forced to extend a play in a winnable game and suffer an injury in the process.

Take the injury out of this and that play was a microcosm of the Cowboys season. They needed an incredible comeback to beat a horrible Falcons team and were bleeding points on defense so badly that it forced Dak to try and carry the team on his back.

Dak was having an MVP season and was leading the league in passing at the time of his gruesome injury.

We have to beg the question of how much better things might be if Prescott had not suffered that gruesome injury. Would the Cowboys be all that much better? Perhaps they would have made last Monday’s blowout loss to the Cardinals more competitive than it was, but nothing we’ve seen from Dallas this season implies that Dak was saving them from themselves. Obviously, having a quarterback who is having an MVP season makes you better than you otherwise would be — something we’re seeing now — and the NFC East is the most winnable division in football. Dak absolutely helps the Cowboys win a division title but not even he could carry this team further than the first weekend of the playoffs. For Dak’s sake, the Cowboys have to do better and can’t put him in this same situation again, or he may decide to remove himself from the narrative.