Tony Romo: The Cowboy Quarterback We All Love To Hate To Love

Football is a game of inches, a true remark made about the professional level of the American sport. Evidence of this fact is presented for 20-plus weeks every year in stadiums all across the United States, and sometimes even in England. But lately, never more often than in America, on America's team.

Of course I'm talking about Tony Romo—everyone else is. Having lived in Dallas through the 90s and then moving out of the state, I thoroughly understand the greatest heights of the dynasty, the lowest valleys of playoff drought, and the bitter enmity practiced as a religion by every other place other than the Big D. People love to hate the Cowboys almost as much as they love talking about them.

And leave it to Jerry Jones to build a mega-church on the spot of so much limelight, and then put the world's biggest plasma screen inside of it. Leave it to Tony Romo to make it an exciting ride. The Dallas quarterback is a hero, and he is a goat. It's possible that no player has ever been scrutinized from so many angles before, in this the era of By the Numbers, Outside the Lines, between the tackles, and inside the helmet. Skip Bayless even went so far as to dissect how the man wears his ball-cap.

But let's think about this for a minute. Tony Romo has been a starter in the league for a handful of years. He has wins under his belt, but only a few important ones. He's given games away with his arms, even his legs. But is that all that he is? Are those the limits to his potential? Surely if that were the bottom line, he would've gone the route of a multitude of other signal callers that no one can remember the names of.

"Why?" is the pertinent question of course, but I have an answer for that, too. Romo persists because every coach on every team, at the end of the day, would rather have a player that can make plays than a player incapable of winning a game. And whether or not Romo can win isn't in contention. He can because he has. It just so happens that he can also lose. In fact, he does both of these things exceptionally well, with a flare and spectacle few others can duplicate. Kind of reminds me of another quarterback that played in the past few years. Future hall-of-famer, super Bowl champion, legendary record-breaker.

So while I'm quoting things said by wiser people than me, here's another: He is who we thought he was. Nothing is going to change the way he plays the game. And maybe, just maybe if the team around him played a little better, his mistakes wouldn't seem so world-ending. A running game to milk the lead, or a defense to stop the gap from closing.