No matter how impartial TV moderators and radio sports jocks are supposed to be, every single one of them comes from a team or a city with a team they favor. That’s not just a given, its a reasonable expectation. Across the TV divide – the ESPNs and ABC/CBS/NBC sports channels, I mean. – as competitive as the jocks are with one another, they share in common a very unprofessional trait in which they are prone to borrow clichés from one another that go on to become truths. That’s because once a thing gets repeated enough times or written about enough times in the same way, people make it a truth -- truth or not. And so is born a cliché like the one running rampant among sports jocks this week, “Can Romo finally be trusted?” Lets get one thing straight right now. Romo could always be trusted. But TV and radio sports jockies have always pinned an inability to be a virtual one-man offense on him, rather than the supporting cast, i.e., the whole (mostly missing) team. NFL teams that went on to win in the playoffs and the Super Bowl the 10 or so years Romo has been the Dallas quarterback were not teams with O lines and D lines that sucked like Dallas. They couldnt have made it, any more than Romo was able to. To suggest that the offensive and defensive lines are not part and parcel of a QB’s success is inane. There is no team in NFL history that went to the playoffs and pushed through to a Super Bowl appearance that had defensive and offensive as wretched as Dallas has had in the last decade, so don’t tell me that Romo alone is responsible for his team’s failure to play as one. It’s been a joke for at least a decade. The fact that Tony Romo is still as iincredible as he is ranks him among the Leagues greatest quarterbacks ever. In the game against the Giants last week he threw 4 TDs in a mere 26 attempts. For anyone whose math fails them, thats one TD every 6 ½ throws. The next closest performance to that was registered by the Bronco’s Peyton Manning, who also threw for 4 TDs but at a rate of one every 8 ½ throws. That may not seem like much but its a performance that is 26% better that Manings. The next best performance was by 4 QBs who threw for TDs one in every 11-13 throws. After that, the spread was 1 TD in 20 – 45 throws, including 5 QBs who didn’t threw 0 TDs in 42-48 attempts. Everyone wants to remember the interception thrown against Denver in the waning moments of the game as evidence of Romo’s failure, exonerating the entire rest of the teams culpability in the process. How hard the rest of the guys blocked, how vigorously the RBs pushed it against the defensive lines and secondary’s, how precisely WRs and TEs ran passing routes, how many balls were caught instead of dropped, none of any of this counts as far as theyre concerned. It’s only did Romo find the way in the game to put a “W” in the column for Dallas. Do they remember hes won twenty-seven 4th quarter comebacks or that his TD/INT record in the 4th quarter is 81 TDs to 27 INTs? No. Now listen up you haters: The “W” in the column is earned from the opening kickoff until the 60th minute that ends the game. Not 38 of those minutes, not 43 of those minutes, not 59 of those minutes, but all 60 minutes. The Win as well as the Loss rides on the shoulders of everyone on the field. Stop one of Denver’s 5 TDs last year, and it’s a Dallas win. Run one correct route that resulted instead in an interception, it’s a Dallas win. Every Win and every Loss is a Team Win or a Team Loss. In summary, for all you naysayers who need a scapegoat and have found one in Romo, “trust” has NEVER been an issue in the Romo Decade. He’s playing as well as any QB in the Legaue and has for years – this year with a partially fractured back. He is the greatest QB never to play in a Super Bowl, but this finally one time you could hold your breath with hope because, instead, hes just about become one of the greatest QBs ever to ever win a Super Bowl. And when that happens, while Tony Romo himself will be among everyone else whose first words will be, “It was a team effort”, no one but no one will appreciate as much as he does that he finally has one.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 18:16:46 +0000
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