The war of words in the NFC East is underway.
Last week, Dak Prescott, the rising sophomore of the division's defending champion Dallas Cowboys, made headlines when he declared on the hallowed ESPYs red carpet that Dallas would repeat as champs of the East.
Having supreme confidence in your team before training camp even starts isn't uncommon, especially coming from a young quarterback who's only known winning in this league. But in Dak's case, it was a definitive statement that completely ignored, in the moment, the Cowboys' greatest threat in the division: the New York Giants, a team to whom Dallas fell in two of its three regular-season losses last year.
So it wouldn't shock anyone if some members of Big Blue took offense to Prescott's posturing.
Instead, when asked Friday morning on Good Morning Football if Dak was right to make those early boasts, Giants kick returner Dwayne Harris (formerly of the Cowboys) cooled tensions.
"You know, I let people think what they want to think. They, on paper, they probably look better than us right now," Harris told the GMFB crew. "But we always match up good with them, so we'll see."
When asked if the G-Men own the Cowboys after last year's sweep, Harris played it safe, saying, "For us, it's always going to be a close game for some reason. So I don't know. We just always seem to come out on top. It's always a great game. I love playing against Dallas, I got a lot of friends over there. Just going out to Jerry World and playing over there, man, it's always amazing. I just love it."
Dallas' ground game, paced by Ezekiel Elliott and a veteran offensive line, was otherworldly in 2016, while the Giants were one of the worst rushing teams in the league. New York's pass rush and secondary were dominant forces in '16 with newest additions Damon Harrison and Janoris Jenkins paying major dividends out of the gate; without Greg Hardy and a slew of suspended starters, the Cowboys struggled once again to develop any heat on opposing quarterbacks and then dismantled their already shaky secondary in the offseason.
Put these two NFC East foes together in a proverbial blender and you come up with a bona fide Super Bowl contender. But for now, with holes at many positions, both clubs will have to settle scores against one another with preseason predictions, just like the rest of us.
