Romo returns to restore order to Cowboys
But will hero's return mean a fairytale ending, or a nightmare?
 Tony Gutierrez / AP Tony Romo is ready to return to Dallas' lineup. “I’m just going to go out there and do what I do, you know?” |
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It’s Wednesday. “Tony” talks today.
The mess of tangled humanity in front of Romo’s locker blinks back at him, wary that the arms, legs and torsos he decides to part will belong to them and that the minutes spent staking out a prime location in front of “Tony’s locker” will be compromised.
Romo smirks his dimpled smirk, turns his shoulders and edges to the vacant space in the middle. He settles on the bench in front of his spot like a nucleus returning home to its cell. The cell walls close, all entries sealed off.
Romo’s round, black eyes scan the hovering faces. He looks down at his hand. Elbows on the insides of his knees, he fiddles with the small splint on his right hand and waits for the questions to start. The blue mesh hat turned backwards and pulled tight to his head only adds to the carefully rumpled “aw shucks” personality he’s settled on as his Public Persona.
Any moron could come up with the storyline-to-date for this Cowboys season.
The Cowboys — with attendant glitz and hype to match a roster laden with talent — broke from the gate fast. Then the fall. A home loss to the Redskins on September 28. A narrow win over the horrible Bengals a week later. A mind-numbing overtime loss to the Cardinals in Arizona, a game in which Romo broke his right pinky and real panic gripped Planet Cowboy. Then, Romo-less, Dallas was eviscerated by winless St. Louis. After narrowly beating Tampa, they rolled over and played dead against the Giants, skulking into their bye week at 5-4. Sunday, the third-place Cowboys play at Washington. The Redskins are 6-3.
This is the part where the hero — banished — returns astride his horse. Looking down into the valley at the chaos and pillaging that’s taken hold, the hero spurs his steed and plunges ahead. The hero’s pinky feels better. Restoring order is his charge now.
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Not far from Romo’s locker, Dallas linebacker Bobby Carpenter ruminated on that.
“Is injecting him into the lineup a cure-all?” he said, repeating the question. “No. But you definitely have one of the top five quarterbacks in the league coming back. And when you put a top-five player at any position back onto a team, especially at quarterback where he controls as much as he does, you have to expect it will contribute to some success.”
A lot has changed since Romo went down. First off, the team’s gone from 4-2 to 5-4. And they’ve added wide receiver Roy Williams but taken significant injury hits at other spots. They’ve also spent more than a month getting tossed on the waves of controversy, speculation and dysfunction which is a by-product of embracing the chance to be the NFL’s “it” team of 2008.
After the Cowboys' loss at New York, owner Jerry Jones cautioned that when Romo returns he would not, “Hit the ground running as if he's been out here completely healthy and be coordinated with Roy Williams, Terrell Owens and (Jason) Witten. He can't be as effective as he could have been if he'd been playing straight through. That's gonna be a real challenge.”
It’s worth noting that Romo wasn’t standing the NFL on its ear before he got hurt. While his statistics were fine, he’d still not broken his habit of making at least two or three costly decisions in every game.
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