ESPN NFL writer Bill Barnwell provides his take on the Cowboys' QB situation and predicts their offense will have an interesting matchup against the Packers' defense. (1:28)

You should know up front that Dak Prescott was never shy about his ambitions. He was 8, 9 years old when he was following his older brothers around a high school football field speaking the words of a prophet.

"I'm going to win the Heisman Trophy," he would say, "and I'm going to play for the Dallas Cowboys."

Well, one out of two ain't bad.

Prescott doesn't just play for the Dallas Cowboys -- he plays quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, today's NFL equivalent of playing center field for yesterday's New York Yankees based on scrutiny, if not wins. His is among the most coveted jobs in American sports, and one that the 23-year-old rookie has handled with the poise and grace of a 10-year vet.

Prescott is 4-1 and riding a four-game winning streak into Green Bay's Lambeau Field, where he needs eight clean throws to break Tom Brady's record of 162 consecutive passes (set over the 2000-2001 seasons) without an interception to start a career. A fourth-round pick, Prescott has replaced an injured $108 million starter, Tony Romo, the way a sixth-round pick, Brady, replaced an injured $103 million starter, Drew Bledsoe, in 2001. The eighth quarterback picked in the 2016 draft ranks second in the NFL in Total QBR, behind Matt Ryan and two spots ahead of Sunday's opposing QB, Aaron Rodgers.

What a not-so-long, strange trip it's been for a kid from Haughton, Louisiana, who had left Mississippi State burdened by comparisons to Tim Tebow. Like the former Florida Gator, Prescott was a dual-threat force who wore No. 15 (in Tebow's honor), who threw for more than 9,300 yards and rushed for more than 2,500 yards for Dan Mullen (Tebow's offensive coordinator at Florida), and who became rock-star popular at an SEC school by leading with his best trait -- a generosity of spirit. Prescott once even had a dog named after Tebow.

"When Dan Mullen recruited Dak," recalled Jason Brotherton, head coach at Haughton High and an assistant during Prescott's years, "Dan told him, 'If you want to know more about me, call Tim Tebow.' He whipped out Tebow's phone number, and Dak was awed by that. Dak's love of Tebow was more about his character, his leadership, how he gave 100 percent all the time and put his team on his back. But when it came to the finer points of playing quarterback, even though Tebow won the Heisman, we always thought Dak threw the ball better than he did."

The rest of the NFL is finding out the truth the hard way. Prescott has completed 69 percent of his passes (Carson Wentz, fellow newbie and No. 2 overall pick, has completed 67.4 percent of his), and though three of the seven touchdowns he has accounted for have come on the ground, Prescott has rushed the ball only 19 times for 61 yards; he has thrown it 155 times for 1,239 yards. In other words, the Cowboys' quarterback is a pocket passer who uses his mobility to chuck it, not tuck it.

He looks, plays, and sounds like a top-10 draft choice, and perhaps a March arrest and charge of driving under the influence (he was found not guilty in July) was partly responsible for his slide to pick No. 135. "People said the DUI charge was a hindrance before Dak was cleared," said his oldest brother Tad, "but even before the arrest, people who get paid to know what they're talking about had him in the fourth or fifth round.

"Dak was always a first-round talent. The Tebow comparison kept coming up, but that really should've been more of a character comparison. Everything bad you could say about a quarterback, people were saying about Dak before the draft. He's inaccurate with the ball. His footwork isn't great. He's never taken a snap under center. He doesn't have the arm strength. Six months later, everyone in the NFL is saying Dak has all those things."

And then some. The making of this Dallas star began inside the trailer-park complex in Princeton, Louisiana, where Dak and his siblings were raised by their single mother Peggy who did not accept any show of weakness kindly. As a child Dak would often play tackle football (without pads) with his older, much bigger brothers and their older, much bigger friends. A 6-year-old Dak once took a nasty hit that inspired a fistfight between Tad and the guy who delivered the blow, and that left the youngest Prescott in tears as he ran inside to his mother.

"Don't come in here crying," Peggy scolded him. "If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch."

Dak wiped his eyes and headed back outside for more. "And once he got on a football field with guys his age," Tad said, "it wasn't even fair."

He dominated out of the spread offense at Haughton, running and throwing from the shotgun and chasing that childhood dream of someday playing a three-hour drive away for the Cowboys. Somehow, some way, the heavyweight colleges questioned Prescott's worthiness as a big-time quarterback. Rodney Guin, the Haughton head coach back then, said LSU was initially interested in his guy as a tight end. "And I don't think that sat well with him," Guin said.

At Mississippi State, the 6-2, 225-pound Prescott led the Bulldogs to its first No. 1 ranking in 2014. AP Photo/Rainier Ehrhardt

Mullen and Mississippi State never wanted him to change positions, and by the time LSU came around to seeing Prescott as a quarterback, it was too late. The Bulldogs weren't only getting a prospect tough enough to throw for nearly 400 yards while playing with a torn MCL; they were also getting a prom king who didn't act like one.

"We had an autistic team manager whose family was moving," Brotherton recalled of a boy named Kyle Brister, "and near the end of that kid's last game with us I remember turning to the sideline and seeing no players around. Dak had gathered the whole team around him, and they carried him off the field on their shoulders. That's Dak. After his last game his senior year, when we lost in the state quarterfinals, everyone was sad and crying and thinking how rough it was on Dak. An hour after that game, I walked back in the locker room and Dak was in there throwing the ball around with all these 8-, 9- and 10-year-old kids who worshipped him. Who would do that?"

Dak's impacted 'people in a lot of different ways'

Dak Prescott was a leader and a unifier before he knew what those words meant. His father Nathaniel is African-American, and his late mother Peggy was a Native American from the Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb. Peggy's brother Phil, a professional singer who helped raise her boys, tells the story of taking 3-year-old Dak to the hospital for his asthma condition, and encountering a white woman who shot disapproving looks at the sight of this light-skinned white man holding a black child. Later, as Uncle Phil and his nephew passed the same woman, Dak reached up to grab her hand.

"And she went to jerk her hand back," Phil said. "I saw her reaction and the look on her face. Dak just looked up at her and said, 'Hi,' and she freakin' melted. She said, 'Oh my God, what a beautiful and amazing child.' I'll be 85 with Alzheimer's, and I won't ever forget that scene. Over the years I've just seen Dak impact people in a lot of different ways."

On the Mississippi State football field, the 6-2, 225-pound Prescott carried his school to its first-ever No. 1 ranking in 2014, a year after his life's inspiration, Peggy, died of colon cancer. His late sister, Uncle Phil said, "is 85 to 90 percent of everything her son is today. That girl worked her butt off, and she told you what she thought. She'd ask Dak, 'How did practice go?' and if he told her he'd thrown a couple of interceptions, she'd tell him, 'Well, you'd better not practice that s---." He didn't. Prescott was known as a relentless grinder in the weight room and film room. Tad remembered his younger brother reviewing plays on his laptop for five hours of an eight-hour round-trip to Vinton, Louisiana, to visit their grandmother.

Brian Johnson, the Bulldogs quarterbacks coach, recalled arriving in Starkville in 2014 and observing the incumbent quarterback in an early morning Valentine's Day workout.

"It was the first time I'd seen him in person," Johnson said, "and he absolutely crushed it. It was crazy. You would've thought Dak was a middle linebacker with the edge and intensity he had. I was like, 'Holy cow, I've never seen a quarterback perform like that in a workout.' He was ripping off reps, doing a super heavy leg press, just a brutal workout. We had three different groups, and he stayed around for the second one to cheer on guys and help them through it. That told me a lot about Dak as a person."

Once upon a time, Johnson had been recruited by Mullen to play for Urban Meyer's Utah Utes. He backed up Alex Smith, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2005 draft, and then recovered from a knee injury to ultimately lead Utah to a 13-0 season and a Sugar Bowl victory over Alabama. Johnson helped Prescott develop his pocket skills with drills designed to help him move his feet while maintaining his balance and keeping his eyes downfield.

"I'm not shocked at how well he's playing because I know he was like the Pied Piper at Mississippi State, where everyone followed him. When a young guy is first put in there, you're not really the starting quarterback. You're just the guy who's starting. But now he's actually growing into the job where he's not just managing the team. Now he's winning games. He's the starting quarterback." Charlie Weis, former football coach on Dak Prescott as a Dallas Cowboy

The quarterback was becoming more and more NFL-ready, even if some scouts and executives missed the point. Prescott had 160 carries as a senior, or 50 fewer than he had as a junior; he had 477 passing attempts in his final season, 81 more than the previous season. He threw 29 touchdown passes against 5 interceptions while completing 66.2 percent of his passes in 2015 (He had 27 TDs, 11 interceptions and a 61.6 completion percentage in 2014). Prescott was doing all of this, of course, while working with a roster of three-star recruits paired against some SEC powers with five-star recruits on the bench.

"Dak wanted to understand how to beat teams with his mind," Johnson said. "He wanted a deeper understanding of the game. He wrote down his goals before each season, and he wanted to master the game. Dak's got an extensive memory bank where he can recall things, and if you go back and clearly watch the film, you'll see him at times appropriately getting to the fifth read in his progression.

"The passing game we ran was very much pro-style. There's some misconception about the spread system not asking the quarterback to do much; we asked Dak to do a lot of different things in protection, in making sure we're in the right run play, in understanding defenses. I think Tim Tebow is probably the greatest college football player to ever play, and if you watch film there are some similarities. But in the passing game, you'd see Dak do stuff we thought gave him a chance to play on Sundays for a really long time."

Tebow was a wobbly-armed first-round pick who won a playoff game in Denver, but who was out of the league in three years. Asked the other day if he'd applied any lessons learned in coaching Tebow to coaching Prescott, Mullen called the quarterbacks "very, very different players" and passed on the opportunity to get more specific. Mullen said he devoted time and energy to the cause of persuading Prescott to check down on certain throws and to wait for a more favorable defensive look on a future play.

"Making the nonspectacular play," Mullen called it. Prescott has made those plays with the Cowboys. Johnson said he has been impressed with how his former pupil has manipulated his arm angles on certain throws and how he has taken something off his fastball on shallow routes.

"He's playing like a well-coached quarterback," Mullen said, "and we all take pride in that."

'The guy's got a chance'

Now what? Does Prescott-Romo become something of a modern-day Roger Staubach-Craig Morton? Cowboys coach Jason Garrett and his primary advisers on the offensive side of the ball, Scott Linehan and Wade Wilson, will have to figure out what to do when their brittle franchise player, Romo, returns from yet another significant injury. Since Prescott has a chance Sunday to break a Brady record, it's worth revisiting the choice the Patriots made 15 years ago.

Bledsoe got hurt near the end of a Week 2 loss to the Jets, Brady guided the 0-2 Patriots back into contention, Bledsoe returned in November, and coach Bill Belichick decided to stick with the kid who would win the Super Bowl and become an all-time great.

Dak Prescott has filled in admirably for Tony Romo, but Romo could return in Week 8. Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports

"The analogy," said Charlie Weis, Belichick's offensive coordinator at the time, "is pretty striking if you think about it."

Weis wasn't eagerly volunteering his take as a quarterback whisperer who has been in this position before. He was merely fielding a phone call and agreeing that Prescott-Romo has some Brady-Bledsoe to it. Weis' son, Charlie Jr., works for Nick Saban at Alabama, so just as the former Notre Dame and Kansas head coach has watched almost every NFL snap Prescott has taken, he saw a lot of him in the SEC too. Weis loved how Dak took a pounding against a superior Alabama team and responded with a winner's composure.

"I'm not shocked at how well he's playing," he said, "because I know he was like the Pied Piper at Mississippi State, where everyone followed him. When a young guy is first put in there, you're not really the starting quarterback. You're just the guy who's starting. But now he's actually growing into the job where he's not just managing the team. Now he's winning games. He's the starting quarterback.

"If you want to draw a parallel, it's very similar to Tommy in 2001. We didn't start too fast with Tommy -- similar to what they've done with Dak -- didn't give him too much early, and then it grew from there ... I know if I were the Dallas Cowboys I'd feel very, very good about the situation they're in. Now, instead of hanging on in games until Tony gets back, they've got two legitimate guys instead of one. Who wouldn't want that situation?"

Weis, reminded that Brady got hurt in the AFC Championship Game victory over Pittsburgh 15 years ago, and that Bledsoe -- who would be replaced in Dallas years later by Romo, of all people -- came in and threw a touchdown pass. He's not advocating one over the other right now, but he is impressed with Prescott's willingness to dump off the ball or throw it away when necessary.

"Any time a young guy gets to his checkdowns, you know the guy's got a chance," Weis said. "[Prescott] obviously has got the team, and I think that's the toughest thing in the NFL for a rookie quarterback, getting the team. Not the team saying things politically correct, but the team actually believing that when he's out there they will win ballgames.

"I don't think Dak is a flash in the pan, one of those guys who goes in there for a couple of good games and you never hear from him again. I think he fits what a young Tony was for the Cowboys. ... Somebody's got to have some balls when they make these decisions, like Bill did [in 2001]. But I don't think the Cowboys can make a bad decision here."

Five games deep into Prescott's career, it's a little hard to believe he has made it a decision at all. He wasn't supposed to be the best rookie on his team, never mind the best rookie in a class that was supposed to feature Jared Goff, a No. 1 overall pick who hasn't even seen the field for the Rams.

Dak Prescott entered the league being compared to Tim Tebow, and now he's drawing Year 1 comparisons to a young Tom Brady. The Dallas Cowboys have had a lot of problems over the past 20 years, but the new quarterback has given them a really good one to have.