Dak Prescott has had quite a bit of success since taking over for the Dallas Cowboys as their quarterback in 2016. A fourth-round rookie who started his first offseason deep on the depth chart, he emerged as a franchise quarterback. Dallas had immediate success with Prescott, who has earned four Pro Bowl nominations and finished among the top MVP candidates twice in his eight-year career.

But Sunday night’s loss, a 30-24 loss to the San Francisco 49ers, put Prescott in a position not seen since 2019. With Prescott under center, the Cowboys have lost at least two straight games on two different occasions. .

Dallas didn’t lose back-to-back games at all, in 2022 or 2023. They lost back-to-back games once in 2021, including a Thanksgiving Day overtime loss to the Las Vegas Raiders. In 2020, Prescott was lost for the season in Week 5, so the last two losing streaks of the year were not his fault.

To see a Prescott-led team this bad, we have to go all the way back to the 2019 season. There is a parallel here too. 2019 was Jason Garrett’s lackluster coaching year. Mike McCarthy and the staff are under the same pressure.

That season, the Cowboys started with three straight wins before losing three straight to fall to .500. They would win three of their next four before dropping four of their next five. Things never quite worked out for that version of the ballclub, and that feeling is familiar as Dallas works its way into the middle of the 2024 schedule.

This article originally appeared on Cowboys Wire: Prescott, Cowboys suffer from questionable performance for the first time since 2019