The Cowboys still haven’t made a call on who will be calling their plays on offense this season, a saga that’s been playing out long enough to make you wonder if they wouldn’t just be better off kicking it old school by letting quarterback Tony Romo call the plays.
That probably won’t happen, but it does sound like Romo is going to have a lot to do with what the plays that do ultimately get called in Dallas this year. We’d heard reports earlier this offseason that Romo would play a role in game-planning, but we hadn’t heard anything about it straight from the horse’s mouth until Cowboys owner Jerry Jones went on Sirius XM Radio with Alex Marvez and Gil Brandt.
“He certainly had a lot of time on the job before he ever started and played. He has a unique grasp of our offensive concepts. The people who are around him the most -- his coaches -- tell me he’s never had a bad idea,” Jones said. “If you think about where he’s at right now, he’s 10 years older than most of the players we have on the field. We think his skill level right now is very much where we hoped it would be and will be for several years to come. But what we want to use more than we ever have is the kind of thing that (Roger) Staubach contributed – input into designing a plan that helps us beat that opponent.”
Jones said that Romo has had input in the offense in the past, but nothing like what they want to see him have this season. That fits with the owner’s desire to see Romo take a page from Peyton Manning’s playbook and it also offers further explanation for why Romo’s decided to cut back on his golf game for the near future.
We can’t know how all of this is going to play out, but we can be pretty sure that you’re gonna be left with some tough choices to make next offseason if an expanded role for your highly paid quarterback leads to the same or worse results.