AP

Seven quarterbacks came off the board before him in April, but that doesn’t keep Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott from putting himself at the top of the stack.

“Knowledge-wise, I think I’m the smartest quarterback that came in this class,” Prescott recently told USA Today. “I would love to go on the board and go head to head with anybody else. That’s how I feel. That’s how confident I am.”

Quarterbacks need to have confidence in themselves. But they also need to be able to back it up, or no one else will have confidence in them.

But Prescott’s confidence may not be misplaced, even though in college his place usually was in shotgun formation.

“The offense we ran at Mississippi State was nothing short of an NFL offense,” Prescott said. “The only thing that was different is that we didn’t go under center. I swear to you, in [pre-draft] visits, every play they showed me, I could name it. We just called it something different. At another team I visited, they ran the exact same stuff we ran.”

Prescott will still have to take some snaps under center in order to run the Dallas offense. He nevertheless has looked great in either spot through three preseason games. Which will only give him more confidence now that he is stepping into the starting job for the foreseeable future.