Tony Romo hasn’t played in a regular season game all year for the Dallas Cowboys. Dak Prescott has started every game and looked terrific, yet the debate of who should started raged on until this week when Tony Romo conceded the job.
The fact that Romo had to publicly concede the job to begin with is a little ridiculous. However, there was a reason behind that public concession.
In a lengthy piece for Sports Illustrated’s MMQB, Albert Breer detailed “The Dallas Decision.”
The decision really was well decided this past week. Last week, when he finally was healthy enough to play, Tony Romo told the Cowboys’ decision makers he wanted to fight for the job and didn’t just want it handed to him.
While playing with the scout team, Romo reportedly had a great week.
“He looked like (Ben) Roethlisberger,” one Dallas source told SI.
However, it wasn’t good enough as Romo was told he officially lost his job after 10 years.
After all, Prescott has been terrific. The rookie was drafted in the fourth round by Dallas as a future replacement for Romo, but nobody thought that replacement would be necessary this season.
Additionally, nobody thought Prescott and the Cowboys would be this good so quickly. Dallas is currently 8-1 and in first place in the NFC East.
But back to the decision to start Prescott over Romo.
Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones has long been vocal about his desire to see Romo be the starting quarterback. No seriously, it seemed like Jones was never going to start anyone other than Romo ever again.
Jones and his son Stephen are very close with Romo. Stephen is the team’s Chief Operation Officer and had a lot of respect for Romo when they told him the job was no longer his.
“Tony’s smart,” Jones said, told SI. “He’s very bright. And so when he came out and said it, in the end, I don’t think it took him long to figure that wouldn’t be a great thing for the team. We’ve got a good thing, and no one wants Dak looking over his shoulder.”
The other thing is, it wasn’t just the decision of whether to start Romo or Prescott this season. The bigger decision the team was making was if they were ready to start their future now.
It looks like they made the right decision with Prescott.
“We’ve got supreme confidence that Dak is our future,” Jones said. “We’ve just seen too much. And you may say, ‘Well, it’s only been nine games.’ No, it’s the full body of work. And it’s not just on the field, it’s off the field too. It’s how he handles every situation—bringing us back down two scores in San Francisco; last week, he leads the game-winning drive twice in Pittsburgh; coming back against Philly.”
As of now it looks like Prescott is the starter going forward, but that decision isn’t official or set in stone.
Head Coach Jason Garrett said this week Romo will get a little more work to do in practice and some more time on the field each week to make sure he’s ready if they need him.
“I think he understands that,” Jones said. “As a competitor, does he want it? Yes. He wouldn’t be in the NFL if he didn’t have that burning in his belly. He’s dying to get out there. And we talked all offseason, he’s never been this fired up about a team, he couldn’t wait. And now to see it work like he thought it would, and the team doing something special, and to want back in, that’s not selfish. It’s just hard. He’s tremendously unselfish, because he understands it.”
[MMQB]
