Washington Redskins vs. Dallas Cowboys: Tony Romo the Comeback Captain?

"Hell coach, I love needles." - Nick Nolte as Phil Elliott, North Dallas Forty, 1979

Before he threw a single pass Monday night, before he called one play, Tony Romo took the needle.

Twice.

There are players who will not do that. If you go back in time to the dark-side-of-football masterpiece by former Dallas Cowboys receiver Pete Gent, North Dallas Forty, it tells of needles, uppers, downers, all the dirty little secrets of pro football back in the day.

It was made into a movie and in one scene, aging receiver Phil Elliott had his knee shot up in front of running back Delma Huddle, who had an aversion to needles. A coach chided Huddle, telling him that Elliott was doing whatever it took to help the team.

Tony Romo took two pain-killing injections for the team before the game against the Redskins, then he went out and took more than a few hefty hits.

If you're grading games, this one was pretty ugly, considering the Cowboys prevailed without scoring a touchdown. But it was a testimony to toughness—the toughness of Romo—and that's rubbing off on his Dallas team.

It would have been easy to sit this one out. Romo wanted no part of that.

"There are only 16 of these games out of 365 days in a year," he said after the victory.

He wasn't about to miss this one.

After listening to all the huffing and puffing from that blowhard Redskins cornerback DeAngelo Hall, it was most fitting that in the fourth quarter, with the game on the line, Romo once again was running for his life behind the line of scrimmage and saw Dez Bryant one-on-one with Hall the Huffer.

This one was easy. Bryant ran hard to his left, Romo threw up a loaf of bread with air under it and Bryant snagged it, with Hall getting a great view of Bryant's backside. To make things worse, Hall slid his hand across Bryant's facemask and got nailed with a 15-yarder.

Hall would later huff and puff about that call, tell us that officials would be fired and so on and so forth—yada, yada, yada, y'all.

It was fitting that after talking mountains of trash, it was Hall who was trashed at crunch time.

Dallas went on to out-grind the Redskins in this one, with things stopping suddenly when Rex Grossman coughed up the football to end this night of nastiness.

For aesthetics, this one held a lot of confusion on both sides of the football.

Romo's receivers, for the most part, looked like guys who had their playbooks stolen a couple of weeks ago and were simply winging it, much to Romo's frustration, as time and again he'd try to get them in the right positions.

Some suggest now that Romo is "Captain Comeback." Sure, he's made a case for that.

But more than that title, he deserves the title "Grinder." He was out there making lemonade from the receivers (who imitated lemons). His only security blanket was Jason Witten and, after a while, the Redskins managed to figure that out.

These Romo-boys, aka Cowboys, have now set an NFL standard—their last nine games have been decided by three points or less.

So, does that make Romo the Count of Close Games? Probably.

What Romo has done is totally tough it out in two key Dallas wins. This team could easily be 0-3, but today finds itself squarely in the NFC East tussle.

If Romo is not Captain Comeback, then he is the King of Kevlar.

You might say he had a major "vested interest" in this game.

More than anything, Romo has set the tone for his teammates. He's ignored pain, hung in there, took the shots and hasn't thrown any of his teammates under the bus, even the ones who left their playbooks on the bus when the season started.

What any team needs is leadership, and the good ones will have leadership at the quarterback position.

Maybe Jerry Jones was on to something when he didn't throw Romo to the dogs after that embarrassing loss to the Jets when there was no fourth-quarter comeback. Instead, there was a fourth-quarter Cowboys collapse.

Jones, instead, pumped up Romo.

That turned out to be the smart thing to do.

Romo took the adversity and overcame some more and turned it into a 2-1 record.

That, in and of itself, is admirable.

Captain Comeback?

How about True Grit?