The Tony Romo Roller Coaster Crashes All Over Again: Let’s Pick Up The Pieces

The Tony Romo Roller Coaster™ has been up and down and pretty much everywhere in between and it’s barely October. Less than a week ago, Tony Romo played through broken ribs and guttiest gritmesiter in the history of scrappiness. He was the darling of the sports media, and I was right there with all of them, guzzling the Kool-Aid.

That made Sunday’s collapse especially gruesome.

I e-mailed my best friend on Tuesday—a day after Romo’s Grit Super Bowl vs. the Redskins Monday Night—and said then, “It feels weird and I know this is stupid, but I think I’m a Romo believer now. It’s like going back to a girl who’s guaranteed to cheat on me and break my heart.”

And he sent back, “But you’ve never gone back to a girl who cheated on you, right? So it’s really more like going back to a girl who you know you’re going to cheat on.” And he was right.

Nothing about Romo has changed over the years or even the past few weeks; he’s still the player who can look unbeatable one minute, then turn around and get you beaten the next. The only thing that changes from week to week is whether everyone else stays faithful.

Now, if anyone has anything positive to say about Romo after Sunday, it’s coming through clenched teeth. He’s the most frustrating player in the NFL. Even Deion Sanders had to vent on Sunday.

But all the criticism’s a compliment, in a weird way.

For instance, nobody freaked out when Rex Grossman nearly threw the game away in St. Louis, because that just seems like something Rex Grossman should do. Nobody goes crazy when Joe Flacco or Mark Sanchez self-destructs against a good defense. Fans and analysts nitpick someone like Romo for the same reasons they nitpick Michael Vick. Because when they’re good, they’re really, really good.

With sports, if a team goes .500, we focus on the 50 percent of the time they fail. But if a team goes 12-4 and then chokes in a championship game, they become the biggest chokers in the universe; a million times worse than the crappy team that went 8-8.

It’s the same with players. If a player’s dominant 90 percent of the time but costs his team 10 percent of the time, he’s a liability, and that 10 percent may as well be 100. But for the record, it’s much easier for guys to close the gap on that 10 percent than to dominate 90 percent of the time. And for Dallas, even if Romo’s always gonna have that 10 percent in him, he’s still 90 percent the player that every team in the league spends years trying to find.

So now the Cowboys are 2-2 headed into the bye week, and the mainstream media’s going to spend as much time questioning Romo this week as they spent worshiping him last week. Whatever. Just to pre-empt a few of the sports talk shows over the next few days... Some questions:

“Can The Cowboys Win With Tony Romo?” Of course. Romo may have cost them two wins, but he also won them two games, and had a few things happened differently, they’d be 4-0 right now, headed into their bye week before a showdown with the New England Patriots in Week 6. Even if you think Romo’s a liability, the Lions and Jets were the absolute worst case scenario. What are the odds of the worst case scenario happening to the same team, three times in a 16-game season?

“Can Tony Romo Hold Up Under All This Criticism?” Definitely. For better or worse, sometimes it seems like Romo’s not all there, mentally. For instance, a normal quarterback might have thrown two interceptions and, when the Cowboys got the ball back with a three-point lead late in the fourth quarter, he’d have been extra careful about where he threw the ball. Some guys have a feel for “the moment”, and others just play, oblivious to what happened before or what might happen next. So Romo’s a little like Manny Ramirez in that sense. That’s why he’s facing all this criticism, but it’s also why all this criticism won’t phase him.

“How Much Blame Does Jason Garrett Deserve?” Let’s see... This is Garrett’s third year with Romo, and the paragraph above has been obvious for about five years now. So yeah, I’d say Garrett deserves some blame for not being more careful with Romo. For instance: When he’s got a double digit lead, take the ball away from him. Hand the ball off, throw screens, whatever. When Romo begins to self-destruct, millions of NFL fans can see it coming from miles away. Meanwhile, Jason Garrett calls plays like nothing’s happening, the innocent by-stander while Tony Romo drives the Cowboys off a cliff.

“Can The Cowboys Win A Super Bowl With Tony Romo?” If the Giants won with Eli Manning, then yeah, there’s no reason the Cowboys can’t eventually win a championship with Romo. But here’s the (obvious) distinction: Those Giants weren’t built around Eli. He was asked to make plays, but he wasn’t asked to carry the team all by himself. With Romo, the Cowboys can have a 20-point lead, and the offense still revolves around him dropping back and making things happen. So we go back to something we said after the Jets debacle in Week 1: “A team can win a Super Bowl with Tony Romo, but a team built around Tony Romo can’t win a Super Bowl.”

“Would You Want Tony Romo On Your Team?” Okay, gimme a second here.

For all the stories of his goofy bachelor party in West Virginia or that ridiculous wedding video earlier this year, we always wondered whether Romo had what it takes to be an elite quarterback.

ESPN and other outlets may have fetishized his performance to no end, but what Romo did against the Redskins—playing with a fractured rib, a recently-healed punctured lung, and a collection of receivers straight off the street—was one of those moments in sports that proves the oldest rule: Real life is always better than fiction. You couldn’t possibly have scripted a tougher performance.

Monday night we learned: Tony Romo’s not perfect, but he won’t quit, ever. If there’s an excuse—and there have been plenty over the course of his time in Dallas—Romo’s not going to make one. All the cliches thrown around during Romo’s two weeks in the spotlight make his subsequent collapse seem perfect. After all the rhetoric, Sunday’s second half shows how ridiculous the rhetoric really was. But even if he’s got too much credit for being Gritty McGritterson out there, that was still really him, playing through fractured ribs and a punctured lung, winning two football games.

Romo’s the guy who carried his team for two weeks, and couldn’t quite carry them the other two weeks. In the end, if someone gave most fans the chance to root for a quarterback with the potential to single-handedly make an average offense look dominant, they’d take it. He’s got flaws, sure. But he’s still worth the gamble, especially since we know he won’t quit.

A lot of Cowboys fans watch this team expecting a win every week. A lot of sports fans, even—they watch the Cowboys expecting to see the best team that money can buy, and when Romo and the Cowboys fail, they turn around and snicker because Jerry Jones deserves it. And he does.

But take it from a Cowboys fan—like Miami Heat fans, a lot of Cowboys fans are horrible, fairweather sports fans that expect to win every week and then whine incessantly when things go wrong.

The reality is, the most sports fans can hope for is a chance at something special. There are no guarantees, and if it’s not three second half interceptions, maybe it’s an ACL tear. What makes sports fun, though, is when your favorite team has a chance at being great.

And even after Sunday, even if half the country thinks he’s a punchline this week, Tony Romo still gives the Cowboys that chance every week, and every year. So yes, his second half single-handedly ruined my Sunday. But no, I’m not ready to cheat on him just yet.