Tony Romo: Threat or Menace? Everything you think you know about Tony Romo is wrong. Romo has been a starting quarterback for seven years, but no player in the league is more misunderstood. And that’s before you start listening to the rumors about his work ethic or groovy new exercise regimen, both of which are among his employer’s favorite talking points. There’s a gap between Romo perception and Romo reality; Jerry Jones straddles it crazily, with his wallet on one side and his mouth on the other. Romo has generated attention just two days into Cowboys camp because – get this – he took up mountain running in the offseason. Mountain running is controversial because it sounds flighty and hippy-dippy: real men run in place, on treadmills, in gyms, which we drive to. Romo wanted to keep his new hobby quiet, but he did not count on Jones doing his best Michael Scott impression by gratuitously revealing a personal tidbit (about someone else) simply because his own voice is so darn melodious. Yes, the title of this article was a gag: like J. Jonah Jameson in the comics, J. Jones cannot see the potential hero within his loyal employee. Let’s play a little Tony Romo Mythbusters, then address the real question facing the Cowboys. Snappy Comebacks. Tony Romo is terrible in the fourth quarter and incapable of bringing the Cowboys back from behind, right? Sorry, that myth is busted: he is actually pretty darn good in the fourth quarter. Romo tied Matt Ryan for the NFL lead in fourth-quarter comebacks by quarterbacks last season, bringing the Cowboys back against the Panthers, Browns, Eagles, Bengals, and Steelers. The folks at Pro Football Reference now keep track of fourth-quarter comebacks, as well as game-winning drives, which are a whole different event. Statistician Scott Kacsmar goes by the Twitter handle @CaptainComeback, and he performed the research that identified and classified hundreds of comebacks and GWD’s throughout pro football history. Thanks to Kacsmar and the PFR gang, we now know that Peyton Manning holds the all-time record with 38 career comebacks, followed by Dan Marino 36 and John Elway 35. Yes, you read those last two figures correctly. We are doing a lot of mythbusting today. Anyway, Romo has 18 career comebacks, tied for 34th on the all-time list, but to stay current let’s focus on the last four years. Here are Romo’s comeback and GWD totals since 2009, as well as those of other popular starters: Quarterback 4QC GWD Tony Romo 12 12 Tom Brady 6 9 Drew Brees 11 17 Jay Cutler 8 10 Joe Flacco 9 13 Eli Manning 12 14 Peyton Manning 10 12 Phillip Rivers 4 7 Aaron Rodgers 4 7 Matt Ryan 14 19 Matt Schaub 7 9 Comebacks are a pretty terrible way to evaluate quarterbacks. Tom Brady is usually too busy racking up huge first-half leads to trifle with them. (Troy Aikman led just 16 fourth-quarter comebacks in his career, because on his watch the Cowboys never trailed). Peyton Manning’s totals bounce up to 17 and 19 if we go back to 2008 to cover for his 2011 injury, but remember that Romo missed much of a recent season, too. The data in the table really tells us almost nothing about any real or imagined “clutch” ability in a quarterback, but it does speak directly to perceptions. Romo leads comebacks about as often as all the other successful quarterbacks of his generation. A comeback every five games or so does not make a quarterback “clutch,” but it provides tons of evidence that saying he’s “not clutch” is rather ridiculous. If you want something more scientific, check out Romo’s player comment in Football Outsiders Almanac, which breaks down his late-and-close DVOA ratings for the last five years. It turns out that Romo is well above average in these situations, and also performs better in close fourth quarters than he does in ordinary game situations. Cold Snapped. Okay, so maybe he can lead a fourth-quarter drive against the Browns if he has to. Romo still turns every December into a chokenado, right? He goes on some saucy Mexican fiesta for a few days after the Thanksgiving game and leaves his playbook with a cabana boy, leading to an end-of-year slump that keeps the Cowboys out of the playoffs. Sorry, but that myth is also busted. The next table shows Romo’s December and January regular season statistics since 2008. I went back to 2008 because that really was a miserable December for the Cowboys: the year ended with Trent Cole and the Eagles playing xylophone with Romo’s abdomen in a 44-6 Cowboys loss that knocked them out of the playoffs. Romo threw five touchdowns and six interceptions that December, among other strip-sack sins, but this is how the total of his recent winter performances looks: Games Att Comp Comp% Yards Y/A TD Int Rate Sacks 19 675 439 65.0 5143 7.6 36 13 97.8 39 Nineteen games is close enough to 16 games that you can imagine his December performances since 2008 (he was hurt in 2010, remember) as a long mega-season. I’ll take a quarterback with a 65% completion rate and nearly three times as many touchdowns and interceptions in an extended winter season, wouldn’t you? Romo’s quarterback rating is similar enough to his overall rating that it is not worth mentioning; without craptastic 2008, it would be much higher. Romo’s sack rate does shoot up at the end of the season, and that certainly has contributed to his late-season reputation (see that 2008 Eagles game again). Sacks are often the quarterback’s fault, not the line’s, but Romo is not particularly sack-prone for most of the year. Perhaps the sacks are the sign of a month-long hangover. Perhaps they are the sign of an entire offense slipping late in the season. Perhaps they are just statistical noise. If this were a multiple choice test, that first response would be a sucker’s guess. Cabo Wabo. But … Romo is a party animal who doesn’t prepare for games. Well, the infamous Cabo Weekend took place in January of 2008: over five years ago! Robert Griffin was 17 years old when that happened. Romo is now married and has a baby. His new high-profile hobby, remember, is jogging. There’s water under a bridge, and then there’s a dried-up river bed and a forgotten overpass. Okay, Jerry Jones still provides plenty of not-very-coded messages about wanting Romo to be more Manning-like. Whether Romo punches his timecard at 5 PM or sleeps with his playbook under the pillow, there’s a WYSISYG element to a 33-year old quarterback with 93 starts and three Pro Bowls under his belt. A little extra elbow grease may have helped once, but that’s a message best transported by time machine back to the George W. Bush administration. Call this myth “plausible” but outdated and irrelevant: anyone still harping on the end of the 2007 season is missing the big picture. That includes Jerry Jones. Tony Romo had a five-interception game last year. So did Drew Brees. Tony Romo once fumbled an field goal hold in a playoff game. It was a field goal hold. There are tons of bits and pieces that can be cobbled together to make Romo look like a nitwit: that 2008 Eagles tape, some other high-profile miscues, Carrie Underwood’s “Cowboy Cassanova.” On the other side of the ledger are over 25,000 passing yards and 177 touchdowns. It’s really not a fair fight. Now that that’s out of the way, we can take a brief look at some of the real questions the Cowboys face in training camp: Can the offensive line bat above .200? Last year’s line consisted of Tyron Smith and four EZ Pass lanes. This year it’s Smith, center Travis Frederick (the best third-round center available at the end of the first round), and three cap-friendly returnees. Nate Livings led all guards with 18 Blown Blocks, according to Football Outsiders. Doug Free finished second among tackles (to Anthony Costanzo of the Colts) with 27.5 Blown Blocks, plus 15 penalties. Mackenzy Bernadaeu is the other starter; he gets by, but don’t look for him to make the Ring of Honor. The Cowboys line finished 22nd in the NFL in Adjusted Line Yards, a statistic Football Outsiders uses to separate a running back’s performance from his line’s. The Cowboys allowed a respectable 36 sacks, but Romo scrambled his way out of danger many times. Even if Frederick lives up to a first-round grade that existed solely in the Jones family hive-mind (he did not even rate a first-round grade on the team’s own highly-publicized draft board), he is one player on a line that needed four. Romo may be running for his life and compensating for a so-so running game again, and getting blamed for it. Can the defense stop its downward trend? Things got ugly for the Cowboys defense starting around Week 12, when the Redskins dropped 38 points on them. The Nick Foles-Bryce Brown Eagles added 33 points, the Steelers 24, and the Saints 34, before the Redskins delivered a 28-point knockout in which Robert Griffin barely had to lift his shoulder to throw. (One good-looking Cowboys defensive performance, a 20-19 win against the Bengals, was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Bengals Drop a Million Passes Foundation). In other words, the Cowboys defense stank from Thanksgiving on, and they stayed in the playoff picture thanks to 38-33 and 27-24 wins. Yup, looks like the quarterback’s fault to me! Injuries played a big role in the Cowboys’ second-half collapse, but an inability to do anything against the Redskins read-option except talk a good game cost Rob Ryan his job. New coordinator Monte Kiffin is a coaching legend, but he has not held an NFL job since 2008, putting us back in the Romo-Cabo and teenage Griffin era. The Cowboys have run a 3-4 defense forever; suddenly, career outside linebackers like Demarcus Ware are defensive ends and inside linebacker Sean Lee is a middle linebacker. Also, safety is a critical position in Kiffin’s Tampa-2 scheme (or at least it was when we last saw it), and the current Cowboys safeties make Nate Livings and Doug Free look like Larry Allen and Mark Tuinei. Yeah, Ware and Lee will be more-or-less okay, and the difference between 3-4 and 4-3 is often overstated. But it should not be overstated in this case: the Cowboys are going from a blitz-heavy, intricate Ryan Family 3-4 to the blitz-adverse, drop-seven-into-coverage principles of the Kiffin-Dungy school. The change would only be slightly more severe if they switched to the Syracuse full-court press. This is a major adjustment, and it had to be done on the cheap because of camp problems. Cowboys Window of Opportunity: Nailed Shut or Boarded Over? Hey, this discussion of Tony Romo’s worth and work habits has been fun, but we should have had it four or five years ago. The Cowboys playoff nucleus – Romo, Ware, Jason Witten, Jay Ratliff, Miles Austin, a few guys no longer with the team who were holdovers from the Bill Parcells era – pretty obviously peaked in 2007-09. Lee, Dez Bryant, Tyron Smith and a few others represent a halfhearted second wave, but there aren’t enough players close to their caliber on the roster to buttress the Romo generation. Football Outsiders projects 6.9 wins from the Cowboys, and that has nothing to do with Romo’s value as a quarterback or citizen. It’s what happens when a team starts acquiring quality players at a one-a-year rate. Cowboys training camp is open, Romo is playing his way back from minor offseason back surgery, and Jones insists that Jason Garrett’s job is safe. Romo’s new contract guarantees his job is safe. The guy with the greatest job security is the one who has to look in the mirror. The Cowboys will only get better if Romo’s supporting cast gets better before age takes its toll on him; that will only happen if someone figures out he is not a crackerjack general manager who is outsmarting the system. Will Jerry Jones achieve self-awareness? Find out in next month’s issue. But don’t get your hopes up. This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Dallas Cowboys, Jason Garrett, Jerry Jones, Tony Romo by Mike Tanier. Bookmark the permalink. 37 THOUGHTS ON “TONY ROMO: THREAT OR MENACE?”
Posted on: Tue, 06 Aug 2013 22:37:49 +0000
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