Look up the definition of 'ordinary,' and you'll find Tony Romo

[BipolarFuk]

David Whitley
Fox Sports

Evel Knievel had a stock answer when asked why he jumped motorcycles over cars, fountains and canyons for a living.

"I'm Evel Knievel," said the man who suffered 433 bone fractures.

Enough said.

That brings us to the NFL's leading fourth-quarter daredevil, Tony Romo. The Cowboys are crumbling and the blame game is back on in Dallas. People are blaming the owner, the coach and, of course, the gagging quarterback.

In turn, Romo should blame Dallas.

Not for saddling him with Jerry Jones or Jason Garrett or history’s worst defense. Romo should blame Dallas for not letting him be accepted as the so-so player he is.

So-so means somewhere between terrible and great. After jumping between both ends of that spectrum for eight years, it’s apparent Romo’s true landing place is in the middle. He's dramatically ordinary, and we should expect his team to reflect that.

His career record is 62-45 as a starter, but the past four seasons he is 24-28. For all the thrills Romo provided, he has one more playoff win than Tony Roma.

Sunday was a microcosm of his unique ordinary nature. An afternoon of fine QB work against Green Bay was obliterated by two interceptions in the final three minutes.

The 37-36 loss was enough to make semi-grown men like Dez Bryant cry. As always, it wasn’t all Romo’s fault. As always, that doesn’t matter when you quarterback America’s Team.

To quote Waylon and Willie, mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be Cowboy quarterbacks. It’s the country’s most inflated and scrutinized job outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

If you succeed, you’ll go down in history. If you fail, you’ll make the Drudge Report faster than any other player in the NFL.

Romo knows the drill. It became obvious in 2007 when a quick getaway to Cabo San Lucas with Jessica Simpson became worldwide news. If he didn’t want the paparazzi element that comes with the job, he wouldn’t, he shouldn’t have signed that six-year, $108-million contract before the season.

There’s no reason to feel sorry for the guy. But you’d understand why he might have tempted to pick up the phone this week and call Matt Ryan.

"Hey, Matty," Romo would say. "Want to trade places for week?"

Like Romo, Ryan became a $100-million quarterback before the season. Like Dallas, the Falcons entered the year with great expectations. The Cowboys are a disappointing 7-7, but Atlanta is a disheartening 4-10.

Ryan’s stats are comparable to Romo’s. So is his reputation as a quarterback who can’t win big games. If the Falcons were in Dallas, their slide would be a sports-talk staple. Ex-quarterbacks everywhere would be assigned to analyze Ryan’s footwork on third down and predict how it might translate to a snowy Super Bowl.

But Ryan plays for the Falcons. We don't know if he ever vacationed with Carrie Underwood. We are left to ask the football question:

If a tree throws interceptions in the Atlanta woods and nobody sees it, does it make a sound?

Answer: It’s the Falcons. Who really cares?

The thing is, the Falcons’ quarterback is better than Romo. So are the quarterbacks in about a dozen other cities.

Most polls would place Romo borderline on the top third of NFL signal-callers. But people are still dismayed when Romo can't pull off a Drew Brees imitation in December or January.

For sure, he's had a great career for a guy nobody drafted out of Eastern Illinois. His defenders can trot out all sorts of glowing stats. Romo's career QB rating is 95.6, the sixth-best in NFL history.

Of course, modern-day passing has rendered that stat bogus. Six of the top seven quarterbacks in history are currently playing.

Romo's rating is 12 points better than Roger Staubach's. It's 14 better than Troy Aikman's. Who would Dallas fans prefer as their quarterback?

Just when Romo might be swaying a few opinions, he'll do what he did Sunday. Miles Austin had a step on his defender, but Romo's pass was a step too late.

"You get that thing up in the air, a little more loop on it," Jones said on his radio show Tuesday, "Miles is still running."

And if Romo were Staubach, every day would be Christmas. It’s fair to criticize him for all those fourth-quarter glitches. What isn’t fair is to think he should be Aikman or Captain Comeback Staubach.

Romo is a lot closer to Danny White or Craig Morton. They had respectable careers, but you wouldn’t remember them from Mike Phipps if they hadn’t played for Dallas.

Romo's days are far from over, but we would save ourselves a lot of shock over the next few years if we'd just accept him for who he is.

He's Tony So-So.

Expect him to crash.

 

[Cotton]

 

[Genghis Khan]

Dumb. Romo is far from ordinary, let alone the definition of it. Unless you just don't what ordinary means.

 

[Genghis Khan]

This guy is a moron. I wouldn't know who Danny White or Craig Morton were is they didnt play for Dallas? Please. Morton played in the super bowl and white played in 3 straight conference championships. Both were pretty good, and not ordinary.

Idiot.

 

[boozeman]

Not really relevant.

Just thought it was funny.

Didn't know where else to put it.

 

[Cotton]

Yet more of the hindsight bullshit.

 

[BipolarFuk]

I'm starting to think it is racist for Romo to get the blame for anything.

 

[ravidubey]

The media lives to oversimplify the QB position by equating a QB's performance with wins and losses. No one is as surgical as Montana was or Brady is, but I've seen both melt down at the worst possible times when they lacked the support of their team.

Watch last year's playoff losses and you won't recognize either Brady and Peyton Manning.

That's because December is about toughness, and nothing exemplifies that more than a powerful running game and physical defense. Manning and Brady made poor decisions late in each game because they were pressured into it. QB's that have to carry the team roll the dice on every play.

And this is with fine coaching in place.

Dallas has below average coaching and a defense that makes me wish we had Bradie, Roy, Newmsie, Spears, and Ratliff back. One WR is great and the others suspect, and the coaches refuse to run the football.

Romo had a 23 point lead and should have been able to coast to a victory. Instead he was pressed into service by a defense that can't stop anyone and a coaching staff that forgot you must run the football to keep defenses honest.

Yeah I know Romo changed the play-- a clear fuck up, his only fuck-up of the day. What "above average" QB in the whole damned league has that slim a margin of error?

 

[boozeman]

Yet more of the hindsight bullshit.

Romo says he should have eaten the ball: 'I understand that, more than anybody'



Tony Romo said he should have eaten the ball rather than throw it on the second-and-6 play where he was intercepted, giving Green Bay the ball to set up the winning score in a rally from 23 points down.

One reason he didn’t is because the offenses for both teams were moving the ball.

“I think that played a role in that thought process,” he said. “If the score would have been 10-7, I think that would have changed it a little bit. More than anything, I can’t make that decision in that situation. Got to eat the ball. I understand that, more than anybody. We’ve done a good job of that all year long. When you look back, one throw all year, you’d want that one back.”

Romo said he was following the rules of the play, going to a pass when he saw an unfavorable matchup with the run, despite knowing that a pass risked stopping the clock or being intercepted.

“You just go by your rules, and you look to run certain looks, and you look to pass in other ones,” he said. “Obviously, like I said before, if you could do it again, you wouldn’t make the same choice. More than anything, it came up a little differently because I had to make a guy miss, and you just got to eat the ball at that point.”

Romo said the option to pass out of that run play is nothing new. He said the Cowboys have used it for the past five years, and there are examples where it has worked out.

“You hear about the ones that you lose, but you don’t hear about the ones that we do a good job with, the calls that are made, the end of games against New York, Oakland, Minnesota,” he said. “So that’s part of the game. And you understand that.”

Asked how he keeps late-game disappointments from breaking his spirit, he said, “We’ve had plenty of late-game victories. If your football team is good enough, over time, you’re not going to play in 10 of them, 12 games like that in two years. We’ve been playing in them every week, and we understand that. Like I said before, the games are going to come down to a possession, and we’ve had a lot of success in those situations, and we’re going to have a lot going forward.”

-- Carlos Mendez

 

[Clay_Allison]

The media lives to oversimplify the QB position by equating a QB's performance with wins and losses. No one is as surgical as Montana was or Brady is, but I've seen both melt down at the worst possible times when they lacked the support of their team.

Watch last year's playoff losses and you won't recognize either Brady and Peyton Manning.

That's because December is about toughness, and nothing exemplifies that more than a powerful running game and physical defense. Manning and Brady made poor decisions late in each game because they were pressured into it. QB's that have to carry the team roll the dice on every play.

And this is with fine coaching in place.

Dallas has below average coaching and a defense that makes me wish we had Bradie, Roy, Newmsie, Spears, and Ratliff back. One WR is great and the others suspect, and the coaches refuse to run the football.

Romo had a 23 point lead and should have been able to coast to a victory. Instead he was pressed into service by a defense that can't stop anyone and a coaching staff that forgot you must run the football to keep defenses honest.

Yeah I know Romo changed the play-- a clear fuck up, his only fuck-up of the day. What "above average" QB in the whole damned league has that slim a margin of error?

He didn't change the play though. It was a check play with a designed run-pass option and he made the read the way the play was designed, just how he was coached to run it. That nonsense being a part of the offense is part of why we abandon the run. If you show 8 in the box we don't run, period. That means no team every actually has to stop our running game. They just have to show us what they want us to see.

 

[Genghis Khan]

He didn't change the play though. It was a check play with a designed run-pass option and he made the read the way the play was designed, just how he was coached to run it. That nonsense being a part of the offense is part of why we abandon the run. If you show 8 in the box we don't run, period. That means no team every actually has to stop our running game. They just have to show us what they want us to see.

Yep. And now we are starting to get to the bottom of what a huge coaching failure this offensive design is.

 

[Genghis Khan]

And how fucked up it is that Garrett keeps saying, Hey, Tony changed the play! when things go wrong.

 

[Clay_Allison]

Yep. And now we are starting to get to the bottom of what a huge coaching failure this offensive design is.

Designing a few checks into the offense is a way to be clever once in a while, but over-reliance on it and having your tendencies become well known means the defense gets to call your plays for you. Facing the Cowboys, any DC with half a brain will double Bryant, put 8 in the box to make us never run, and use the extra defenders in the box to blitz.

Tony Romo then throws 50 passes into zone blitzes. That's just what Jim Haslett did to us in the last game of 2012, look how it worked out. Garrett's too-clever-for-its-own-good self balancing offense didn't have an answer.

 

[ravidubey]

He didn't change the play though. It was a check play with a designed run-pass option and he made the read the way the play was designed, just how he was coached to run it. That nonsense being a part of the offense is part of why we abandon the run. If you show 8 in the box we don't run, period. That means no team every actually has to stop our running game. They just have to show us what they want us to see.

In that situation, it's up to Jason Garrett to make sure his OC and QB understand that burning time is more critical than getting yards. He needs to tell them to hand the fucking ball off and let DeMarco make a play. If he's determined to pass, tell Romo to take a sack if there's any chance of an incompletion.

 

[Clay_Allison]

In that situation, it's up to Jason Garrett to make sure his OC and QB understand that burning time is more critical than getting yards. He needs to tell them to hand the fucking ball off and let DeMarco make a play. If he's determined to pass, tell Romo to take a sack if there's any chance of an incompletion.

That would require someone to have situational awareness about the football game and Jason Garrett has proven time and again that he has learned nothing about that and will never learn anything about that as long as uncle Jerry is cutting his checks.