Romo's mistake costs not just a bitter loss, but a chance at NFL immortality

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, like Brett Favre, has had a career that has generated as many groans as cheers. Unlike Favre, he hasn’t made up for it in the minds of fans by winning at least one Super Bowl. His head-scratching interception that led to the Denver Broncos kicking the winning field goal in a bitterly disappointing loss to the hated Peyton Manning, 51-48, was unfortunate for another reason; Romo had a chance—given the sieve-like play of the Denver defense—to break one the longest-standing records in major sports, and he blew it. 

With two minutes left in the game, after the Cowboys’ equally horrible defense had allowed Manning to tie the game at 48, the Cowboys had the ball, ready to inevitably cover the yardage necessary to kick their own game-winning field goal. In order to do so, they needed to reach the 30-yard line at least, preferably less. They had no timeouts left, so the principle means to do so was through the air. Provided there was no pass interference penalties, Romo would need to pass for at least 50 yards. 

Why was that significant? Up to that point he had already amassed 506 yards; 50 more yards would have given him 556 yards—and break an NFL record that incredibly has stood for 62 years in this pass-happy league, since September 28, 1951.

On that day, the Los Angeles Rams’ Norm Van Brocklin—at that time only a second-stringer substituting for injured starter Bob Waterfield—shattered the previous record by throwing for a mindboggling (at the time) 554 yards against the hapless New York Yanks, a team that would fold at the end of year, resurface in Dallas, and then fold again. The Rams defeated the Yanks 54-14, rolling-up a then record 722 yards of total offense, allowing only 111 yards. 

One former Yanks player, George Taliaferro, told the New York Times that “We didn’t rush him at all. We didn’t have that kind of a defense, so he could sit in the pocket and let it go. He didn’t have to scramble. Once he got back in the pocket, they were talented enough to divert us around the pocket. He took the ball from center, put it up beside his right ear and when he saw that the receiver had the defender beaten, he could let it go. It wasn’t that he threw a 5-yard pass and then the runner ran 95 yards. He was throwing it 50 and 60 yards.”

Like Van Brocklin, Romo yesterday seemed to be in a zone that few quarterbacks experience, throwing for more than 20-yards per completion all day. The only more impressive performance I can recall was Joe Namath throwing for 496 yards on just 15 completions in a 1972 game against Baltimore. Yet in the end disappointment was all that was had for us statistics fanatics. It just had to be another Romoism to disappoint our hopes, if not quite in the same way for Cowboy fans.