After suffering an injured hamstring late in the third quarter of Sunday’s loss to the Falcons, Dak Prescott appears to be on a collision course with the injured reserve list, according to Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Should that come to pass, Dallas’ $240 million quarterback will miss at least four games, including three that are set to air in national broadcast windows. While Prescott’s absence would seem to cast a pall over the rest of the Cowboys’ season, it’s unlikely to have an outsized impact on the NFL’s TV ratings.
During his weekly radio hit on the 105.3 The Fan, Jones said Prescott was looking at an “extended period of time” away from the team, but stopped short of providing an estimate for exactly how long the QB may be out of action. “I wouldn’t dare make a prediction when it could be, [but] it’s likely we’ll IR him and so we’ll see kinda how his rehab goes.”
A player that lands on the IR must sit out at least four games before returning to the lineup. Should that prove to be the case with Prescott, he won’t be eligible to suit up again until Dallas’ Dec. 9 Monday Night Football matchup against the Bengals.
Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy on Monday indicated that backup Cooper Rush would fill in for Prescott, although Jones suggested that Trey Lance might also see some action against the Eagles this weekend. That NFC East showdown is slated to air in CBS’ national window, which to date is averaging 24.29 million viewers. Among all NFL media partners, the CBS coast-to-coast showcase ranks second behind only Fox’s America’s Game of the Week powerhouse, which is averaging 25.59 million viewers.
While the loss of Prescott is a blow to the Cowboys organization, the team tends to draw a full house regardless of who’s under center. When Rush subbed in for the starter at the top of the 2022 season, CBS still managed to scare up a massive 27.39 million viewers for Dallas’ 20-17 win over Cincinnati. Per Nielsen, that still stands as the biggest TV turnout for a Week 2 NFL game in the 21st century.
Despite a lackluster 3-5 record, Dallas still packs ‘em in every weekend, averaging 22.95 million viewers over the course of five nationally televised games. The Cowboys’ biggest deliveries were notched during their Week 3 duel with Baltimore, which averaged 27.29 million viewers on Fox, trailing only the previous week’s Bengals-Chiefs broadcast on CBS (27.87 million) for bragging rights as the season’s top linear-TV draw. As a national TV attraction, Dallas ranks second among all NFL teams, with the Chiefs at the top of the heap with an average draw of 23.67 million viewers over their first six appearances.
A broken thumb sidelined Prescott for five games in 2022, and in that span, Rush led his team to four wins. As it happens, four of those five outings aired in national TV windows; in that stretch, Dallas averaged 22.94 million viewers per game. By comparison, the Prescott-led Cowboys averaged 24.42 million viewers per game that year over the course of six coast-to-coast broadcasts.
Among the other games Prescott is expected to miss are a Nov. 18 Lone Star State battle with the Texans on Monday Night Football and a Thanksgiving Day date with the Giants on Fox. Given the built-in captive audience of Tryptophan-addled Americans that instinctually huddle around the set every year, Dallas could more or less trot out ALF as their Turkey Day QB and still do a huge number. That said, the last couple of years have been a testament to the NFL’s hegemonic stranglehold on our collective imagination, as the 2023 Commanders-Cowboys game averaged 41.76 million viewers on CBS, coming up just shy of Fox’s record performance the previous season (42.06 million).
Given the demonstrable shot in the arm that out-of-home deliveries have given the holiday games since 2020, when Nielsen began blending those impressions with its vanilla TV data, Fox needn’t overly concern itself about losing ground this year. Like cranberry sauce and whatever yams are supposed to be, the Cowboys are a non-negotiable feature of the holiday, and tens of millions of people will watch no matter who’s sporting the special mic’-ed up helmet. Thanksgiving games don’t even have to be all that competitive; last year, Dallas romped to a 45-10 win over Washington and CBS still walked away with the second most-watched regular-season NFL broadcast of all time.
As Rush already has shown that he can win games and hold an audience, there’s little cause for advertisers to have any second thoughts about their November TV investments. Even though it costs an awful lot to buy time in a nationally televised Cowboys game—according to media buyers, marketers in the spring upfront bazaar paid up to $900,000 a throw for a single 30-second unit in Sunday’s Philly-Dallas broadcast—the drawing power of the Star tends to supersede mere personnel logistics.
Now, if Kansas City were to suddenly be without the services of Patrick Mahomes … well, that would be a different story. Luckily, that’s not been an issue for the three-time champ, who has missed all of three starts to injuries since securing the Chiefs’ top QB role in 2018.
