This Is Why Tony Romo Sucks

Take away the Tampa Bay blow out, Tony Romo is one of the worst QBs in the league.
Since I'm all about comparisons today, let's compare the performance of two QBs from last year.
QB 1
This Quarterback led his team deep into the playoffs (if I give you more details it will give it away), threw more touchdowns than interceptions in 9 of 16 games and finished the year with these stats:

262 / 480, 3193 yards, 23 Tds, 20 Ints, 4.2 Ints/Attempt

QB 2
This Quarterback led his team into the playoffs, threw more Touchdowns than interceptions in only 5 of his 11 starts (4 of 11 if you take away his fluke game) and finished the season with the following stat line if you take away his one absurd blowout on national TV that is the reason for all of the love thrown his way:

198 / 308, 2587 yds, 14Tds, 13 Ints, 4.2 Ints/Attempt

Other than completion percentage, these players had pretty similar stats. If you could name the worst QB in the league last year, who would you think of? I'll give you a second (again). You probably guessed Andrew Walter, well you're wrong but pretty close. Maybe Brett Favre? Nope, but closer. Hows about Eli Manning? No, but now you're real warm. Think about an angry and crazy fan base and a VERY good team. Got it? Yup, QB A is Rex Grossman. QB B then is Tony Romo if you take away the Tampa Bay Bucs game on Thanksgiving last year. Basically, without that game against the Bucs, Tony Romo is one of the worst QBs in the league. I'll get into this more deeply in a second, or now...

I hate Tony Romo. I really do. I do not hate the Cowboys but I do dislike them with a passion. They're the Yankees, Notre Dame and Duke; you either love em or hate em. I used to hate them but warmed up to them a bit because of Michael Irvin's fashion sense on Countdown every Sunday morning (a comically short tie goes a long way towards securing a place in my heart). My hatred of Romo in particular has to due with his undeserved ascension to Quarterback royalty within many circles in the football community. It's as if he took some fledgling franchise on his back and carried them to the promise land. When in fact he took a team many people had picked to win the Super Bowl and was 3-2 when took over and beat the Panthers, Cardinals, Bucs and Falcons (4 of the 6 worst teams in the NFL), and was AWFUL in the two wins they pulled out over the Giants and Colts. He was 1-3 against the NFC East, and in only one of those games did he have more TDs than Ints (and it wasn't the game he won). Not only that but in a key game against Philly in week 16, he put together an almost historically bad performance when it counted the most. And this was all before he blew the playoff game (a game in which he again was playing horribly before he fucked it all up). So even if we give him the Tampa Bay game, he did not have a great year last year. But we are not giving him the Tampa Bay game and it really needs to be looked at with a grain of salt so that Romo's season can be exposed for what it really is: A fucking disgrace.

On Thanksgiving Day, the Dallas Cowboys sha-fucking-lacked the Tampa Bay Bucs in Dallas. In the game, Tony Romo threw for 300+ yards, completed 75% of his passes, didn't get picked and had 5 Tds. A MONSTER performance. Really something. But how good was it? Well, as it turns out, the Bucs were probably the worst team in the NFL last year (you could argue Oakland was the worst but Oakland's defense was so good it's hard to argue that they were the overall worst). They had the third fewest Ints in the league, third fewest sacks in the league, gave up the second most passing TDs and ranked in the bottom of pretty much every pass defense stat you can think of. So it wasn't like he was competing agains the '85 Bears. But a closer look at the game itself reveals so much more about Romo's "transcendent" performance. Romo threw for touchdowns of 2 yards, 1 yard, 2 yards, 7 yards and 30 yards. Three were 2 yards or less and two were thrown when the game was clearly out of hand and probably wouldn't have been called if Parcells wasn't still trying to get a feel for his rookie QB's capabilities. And what he found is that up 20 pts, Tony Romo can complete a 2 yard pass. So this game that was apparently Tony Romo's coming out party was the equivalent of evaluating Brady Quinn's abilities after his performance against North Carolina or Air Force. To put it as clearly as possible, in a statistical sense, Romo's Tampa Bay game is the equivalent of Brady Anderson's 1996 season. It's because of this that I choose to evaluate Romo without taking into account the Tampa Bay game.

First, it's not as though Romo had a frickin banner year even with the absurd Tampa Bay game. The guy was in the bottom 50% for Int/Attempt, had 3 games where his passer rating was 58 or lower and lost to the Lions and the Skins. His saving grace was his completion percentage, which was amongst the highest in the league and accounts for his skewed status in the eyes of people who value that stat. But what is so striking is that when you take the Tampa game away from Romo, he doesn't just look average, he looks horrible. His QB rating (I know, I hate this stat but people use it) goes from 95.1 to 88.4. A seven point drop. No other QB in the league loses more than 3 points if you take away their best day. Romo goes from the middle of the road in terms of Int/attempts to bottom three, and his average ratio of 19 Tds to 13 Ints is horrendous at 14 and 13 if you take the Tampa game away. The best part is that even if you replace the Tampa game with an above average game for Romo (2tds and 1 Int), his final stats would still be horrendous at 16 Tds and 14 Ints. What I'm trying to make clear here is that not only is Tony Romo not a good QB, he's not even really average. And not only that, he had his best chance to succeed last year. It's not like this young buck can just put this behind him and get better, he's 27 and cocky as hell. He has reached his physical peak and is only going to get worse on that side. In terms of mental development, if he was going to learn something he was going to learn it from Parcells. With the easy going Wade Phillips running the show, Romo is in for a serious regression. Plus, who is going to lead that team, T.O.? This is why people weren't crazy when they were pissed that Big D didn't make a move for Quinn. Romo is not the future and he's hardly the past. He is simply not not good enough. And the sooner people realize that, the easier it will be to move on.