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Dak Prescott believes that he and CeeDee Lamb can eventually become a better duo than players like Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison or Ben Roethlisberger and Antonio Brown, to name a few.
“I feel like we can be better than all of them,” he said Friday on the I Am Athlete podcast (17:30 mark). “I know CeeDee has the same expectations, and that’s the communications that we have. That’s the work that we put into this. We didn’t make it if we are Montana and Rice, we only made it if we’re the best versions of ourselves and we bring this organization something that it hasn’t had in a long time, and that’s the Super Bowl, and we put up numbers that have never been done before.”
There are several factors to consider when discussing the greatest quarterback-receiver combos of all time.
The first is one that Prescott mentioned, titles. Montana and Rice won two of those together. Prescott and Lamb, meanwhile, won just one playoff game in their first four seasons as a duo. They have enormous work to do there, especially considering that Prescott only won two playoff games in the first eight seasons of his career.
In fact, the duos that won the most Super Bowl titles together were actually Terry Bradshaw-Lynn Swann, Bradshaw-John Stallworth and Montana-Mike Wilson, all with four. Tom Brady-Julian Edelman and Troy Aikman-Michael Irvin were among the duos with three titles.
The next criteria would be stats. In that regard, nobody comes particularly close to Manning and Harrison, who combined 953 times for 12,766 yards and 112 touchdowns. The receptions and yards are NFL records for a duo, while the touchdowns trail only the pair of Steve Young and Rice (119).
Where the Manning-Harrison and Young-Rice combinations fall short compared to other duos, however, is titles. Both managed just one Super Bowl ring together. They did, however, win plenty of playoff games.
There’s no doubt that Prescott and Lamb have a special partnership and are one of the NFL’s most potent statistical duos. They have a lot of work to do before they become one of the truly legendary duos in NFL history, however, and Prescott knows it.
“I owe so much to the city of Dallas,” he said Friday. “I want to be able to deliver my end of the deal, and bring this city, bring the Joneses, bring the Cowboys organization a Super Bowl that’s long overdue. … I have no doubt that it will eventually happen, so I hope that my career is defined by that.”