Dear Tony Romo: Thanks for saving us — and yourself — the pain



Click through the gallery to relive Romo's most heartbreaking losses as Cowboys QB. less Tony Romo spent most of his final NFL season in street clothes. He called it quits Tuesday, opting to join CBS over trying to catch on with another team.

Click through the gallery to relive Romo's most ... more Tony Romo spent most of his final NFL season in street clothes. He called it quits Tuesday, opting to join CBS over trying to catch on with another team. Photo: Jason Miller, Stringer Photo: Jason Miller, Stringer Image 1 of / 50 Caption Close Dear Tony Romo: Thanks for saving us — and yourself — the pain 1 / 50 Back to Gallery

Thank you, Tony Romo. Thank you very, very much for sparing the Texans and us Houstonians the ultimate of heartaches, the kick squarely to our civic spleen that your coming here to throw a football would have inevitably delivered.

It would have started with a cruel tease, with endless droning, pie-in-the-sky chatter about the Texans' revamped Super Bowl prospects. It would have ended, so predictably, with a teeth-loosening sucker punch in the form of another season-ending injury or a season-ruining gaffe because Tony, your NFL résumé, glowing brightly in many ways, is littered with too many examples of both. You leave with as many of the former as of the latter.

But, let it be said, we appreciate your interest in our team and our town, illusory though it could have been. And we salute you for using your intellect, which will serve you well in your new big-dog analyst's job at CBS, for making the right call personally, for putting future quality time with the kids, Hawkins and Rivers (adorable names, by the way) and the baby that's coming ahead of a final high-risk shot at plugging that conspicuous hole in your football résumé.

That's all I got for you, Tony. We wish you the best and drop by to see us when you can.

Highlights

An early hint

In retrospect, the Romos' revelation on Valentine's Day that Candice was pregnant again should have been the tipoff that football had been relegated to his rear-view mirror. A little simple math would have told us the due date was going to coincide with the high-noon portion of the 2017 season. Did he need Bill O'Brien screaming in his ear while he grappled with a more complex offense than he'd ever had to operate with such bigger-picture issues on his mind?

Of course not.

No comparison: Dallas vs. Houston QBs Five best Dallas quarterbacks 1. Troy Aikman Won three Super Bowls in four seasons and became a first-ballot Hall of Famer. 2. Roger Staubach Won two Super Bowls and led his team to two others. Had a winning record every year he started. 3. Tony Romo Broke all of the franchise's passing records but never got the Cowboys as far as an NFC Championship Game. 4. Danny White Led the Cowboys to three consecutive NFC Championship Games but lost all three. 5. Don Meredith Quarterbacked the Cowboys to three consecutive playoff appearances that included the famous "Ice Bowl" loss at Green Bay in the NFL championship game. Five best Houston quarterbacks 1. Warren Moon Started for the Oilers for 10 seasons and did enough statistically to become a Hall of Famer, but his teams never advanced beyond the divisional round of the playoffs. 2. Dan Pastorini Quarterbacked the Oilers, led by Earl Campbell, to consecutive AFC Championship Games from 1978-79. 3. Jim Kelly His NFL glory came in Buffalo, but he threw for 9,842 yards and 83 TDs in two prolific seasons with the USFL's Gamblers. 4. Matt Schaub Became one of the NFL's most statistically prolific passers and led the Texans to a pair of playoff appearances, although he didn't finish the first of those seasons because of a foot injury. 5. George Blanda Led the Oilers to the first two AFL championships ... but it was only the AFL.

No, seriously, this is such a good thing for all concerned parties. While it's unfair to brand Romo a loser because he never won, and it might even be wrong to call him brittle — as violent the NFL may be, getting seriously hurt is happenstance, the byproduct of being in the wrong place at the wrong time — he is, technically speaking, both with two playoff victories in a decade as the Cowboys' starter and two season short-circuiting injuries in the past three years?

There was no logical reason to believe anything was going to change on the field simply because he changed the shade of blue on his No. 9 jersey and moved 250 miles south down I-45. At 37, an age where excellence is purely accidental for anyone not named Tom or Peyton or isn't a punter, he would have been just another dart the Texans were throwing at a dartboard.

Given the deficiencies of their aim over the last 15 seasons, certainly regarding the quarterback position, the bull's-eye would have been an improbable landing spot.

Woes averted

There's no pain greater than that of unfulfilled expectations and Romo's presence in the Texans' huddle would have guaranteed the likes of which we have never experienced. David Carr arrived with no more than untested-rookie carry-on baggage, waiting until he settled in to become a Paris-bound socialite. Matt Schaub actually outdid himself until his abrupt, awful end. Ryan Fitzpatrick and Brian Hoyer, a pair of card-carrying journeymen, never set us up for the fall. And, if Brock Osweiler did, that was our own damned fault.

As for the "now what?" thing, I don't have much to offer. Brandon Weeden is what he is, which is to say a competent, capable backup, and Tom Savage represents still-uncharted waters. He looks and carries himself like an NFL quarterback and through a second-hand source I've been told that Andre Johnson _ someone to hear out on such matters —, believes Tom's potential terrific-ness because of his hyper-accurate arm.

But nobody, Johnson included, has yet seen Savage stay upright for a long enough patch in games that count to accurately predict his future upside. The best we can say about Savage is that he has done nothing to not deserve the chance to become entrenched as the starter. At the same time, he has done little to show he's capable of becoming entrenched as the starter.

And whomever the Texans draft April 27 — ideally, Patrick Mahomes, although the Texas Tech QB's stock has risen too high for him to be available with the 25th pick — won't be the answer this season unless he's another Dak Prescott. And I don't have to remind you how improbable a second such lightning strike in Texas is to happen two seasons in a row.

Dallas' dumb luck

The Cowboys are a reminder that it's usually better to be lucky than good because there's no way they thought Prescott would reach the level of competence he achieved from the get-go. If Romo hadn't been Romo, an accident waiting to happen, Prescott would have only seen garbage time.

At some point, however, one would hope the law of averages will kick in on Houston's behalf. It's staggering to contemplate that our only championship-winning quarterback remains George Blanda, an NFL washout when he took the reins for the Oilers of the upstart AFL in 1960. Dan Pastorini, a first-round pick in 1971, rode Earl Campbell to a couple of AFC Championship Games and Warren Moon was a high-profile free-agent in 1984 who accumulated Hall-of-Fame-worthy stats but couldn't escape the divisional round.

But the galling one was Steve McNair. A first-round pick in 1995, he alone led the Oilers to the Super Bowl. Alas, by then, they were the Tennessee Titans.

Obviously, we'll never know for sure how Romo's rolling the dice on his future health and well-being would have played out in Houston. But a preponderance of the evidence, albeit circumstantial, he leaves behind in Dallas suggests he'd have been a train wreck, and we've had enough of those already.

Star-crossed QB

When the news hit that Romo was retiring, I thought of the cover story Michael J. Mooney wrote for Texas Monthly, timed to run before the start of the 2016 season. Comprehensively recounting Romo's star-crossed Cowboys tenure over the course of several thousand words, Mooney closed his piece with the following:

"Romo underwent the Mumford procedure on March 8 (2016, to correct residual shoulder problems resulting from a broken collar bone). The next day, the Cowboys released a statement saying the surgery had been 'successful.' For the first time in several years, he had a full off-season to recover and to prepare for the season ahead. In his last meeting with the media before training camp started, in August, Romo said he felt good. 'I'm throwing the ball as well as I ever have,' he explained. Twice he said he was trying to 'perfect' his 'craft.'

"Maybe that means that this year will be the year he gets that extra yard. The year he's able to score on that final possession. Maybe this is the year Romo ends the final play of the final game a winner. We all remember that night in Seattle, or that day against the Giants, or the loss to the Broncos, or the pain of the Green Bay game. But we hope, because we have Tony Romo.

"Maybe this is the year."

Nope. Romo couldn't even make it through the preseason, suffering a broken bone his back during a Thursday-night exhibition game against Seattle. He didn't get on the field again until the Cowboys had long since become Prescott's team.

Now, he's done — presumably — for good and everybody's the better off for it.