Best quarterback in football

Holy God, Brian, you need to put passer rating on ignore. The fact that Romo is second all-time and Rivers is fifth should be enough to tell you that it doesn't mean anything.

Romo loses games in the fourth quarter.

 

Two points LTL: 1. Romo has 14 career game-winning drives in the 4th quarter and 13 career fourth-quarter comebacks. That's one in four Cowboys win with Romo at QB were engineered by late comebacks (I'm assuming some of those wins came when he was hurt last season, so it's probably better than 1 in 4).

Read this. It's a little dated, coming after the Jets game, but it gives you an idea of how Romo has performed late: http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/Articles/11_3992_Tony_Romo%3A_Choke_Artist_or_Not%3F.html

Indeed, Romo does just fine in the fourth quarter. But he's had some very bad missteps, which get turned into tendencies in the minds of some people.

If Brees throws a fourth quarter interception and the Saints lose to an awful Bucs or Rams team because of it, people notice, but it's quickly forgiven when the Saints get their usualy 10-13 wins, win their division and win playoff games. But when Romo does it, it means they go 8-8 and miss the playoffs. But really, without Romo they are a 3-13 team (at least in these last few years). He's adding 4-5 wins a year to that team. You put him on the Texans this year and they are playing in two weeks (to be fair, I'd say the same thing for a healthy Schaub).

And if the Cowboys had New York's defensive line, they'd be the Giants, only better. They'd be an 11-5 type team in the regular season and a good post-season team because they'd have a great passing game on offense and a great d-line. They'd be similar to the Giants now, only they'd have a more efficient passing game.

 

Would the Cowboys really be 3-13 without Romo? In 2010 the Cowboys were a .500 team without Romo and a .167 team with him. And that was with Jon Kitna as his replacement. Not saying they're better off without him, but how big a drop would there be if you replace him with, say, a Matt Ryan, or even a Matt Cassel?

 

Romo does just fine in the fourth quarter except for his very bad missteps. Got it.

Your single-minded obsession with passer rating, which was never really formulated based on any results-based criteria anyway (seriously, 158.3 is "perfect"?), clouds everything else you're looking at. Michael Vick has a career passer rating of 80. Roethlisberger had a season rating of 80 in 2008, when he did some of his best work and his team won the Super Bowl. Just look down the list of career passer ratings and you will see how comical it is.

Romo's teams often fall behind. By a lot. That leads to tons and tons of yards and good completion percentages.

This season if he doesn't overthrow Austin by 10 yards on third down, it's an 80-yard touchdown and the Giants can't come back and the Cowboys make the playoffs. May not show up on the stat line as anything other than a minor incompletion, but that's the kind of thing people are talking about.

 

To be fair, the Cowboys turnaround in 2010 started after the change of coaches, not after the change in QBs. They were 1-4 with Romo at QB, then 0-3 with Kitna before Phillips got fired and things improved under Garrett.

I think Ryan would get slightly worse results than Romo because he's been a slightly worse QB. Cassel would probably fare as well as he has faired with the Chiefs, who have had a comparable team in the last few years to the Cowboys.

In the last three years, Romo has about 10,300 passing yards, 68 TDs and 26 ints. Cassel has about 7,800 passing yards, 53 TDs and 32 ints. You tell me who's better. Both missed significant parts of one of the three seasons.

Ryan's been pretty much healthy for all three seasons and has about 10,800 yards, 79 TDs and 35 ints. He's played in 8 more games in those three years, so his per-game TDs are worse than Romo and so are his per-game TDs. His per-game yards are way behind.

So yeah, the Cowboys are probably better with Romo than Matty Ice, who I really like as a QB too.

 

LTL, you are a selective reader.

You miss the part where I note I put him behind several other QBs with worse passer ratings, so that completely invalidates your theory that I'm "single-minded" about passer rating.

You also COMPLETELY ignore the stats provided that disprove that he has been a poor performer late in games. He has won his share in late game situations and as a late-game quarterback, he has been WAY better than Aaron Rodgers, who everybody agrees is a top three QB.

The one thing I'll concede to the anti-Romo camp is his December record is not good.

 

The stats do not disprove that he has been a poor performer late in games. That is my point, the stats you cite as "proof" do not prove that. Football just cannot be broken down by stats the way baseball can. By observation and example, Romo butchers the end of a hell of a lot of games.

 

Two awful points there LTL

1. If the Cowboys fall behind a lot, then he should get tons of credit for the Cowboys being 51-35 with him as a starter instead of being labeled as a "choker."


2. That Austin overthrow is the kind of thing that gets overhyped on Romo. Sure, he missed that pass. But every mistake he makes, especially late in games, gets magnified by his reputation.

Romo is 21-31 for 305 yards, 4 TDs and 0 ints in that game and you say he LOST a game because he overthrew one pass at the end. That's irrational. His defense gave up over 500 yards in that game. How about the defense getting a stop?

Again, the Cowboys aren't even in that game if their QB doesn't throw for 4 TDs and doesn't turn it over.

 

I'm a Cowboys fan and a Tony Romo fan, and I completely agree with this.

 

That's true. And they win if he makes that throw. And that's why people trust and rank Big Ben and Eli and Schaub and a lot of other guys over him even though your precious "passer rating" says it isn't so.

Tony Romo has a higher passer rating than Peyton Manning or Joe Montana or Tom Brady. If that tells you anything other than how useless passer rating is, you are crazy.

 

The fact that he has a better record in leading teams from behind than Aaron Rodgers proves nothing? That he has a similar record in late-game comeback attempts as Aikman and Favre means nothing?

He's fared better in close games than Aaron Rodgers (10-18 vs. 5-18 at the time of that publication of the listed article). That's just a fact.

I have no loyalty to Romo. I'm a life-long Cowboys hater who has moved more into the indifferent column. But watching dispassionately, I can't help but notice that certain things make people hate Romo: 1. He's a Cowboy (GREAT reason), 2. The whole celebrity dating thing, 3. He's a bit cocky. 4. He's a Cowboy.

I have "he's a Cowboy" on there twice for a reason. For some, they love to pick on him because they HATE the Cowboys and when things go wrong for these Cowboys, it's fun to use him as the pinata for the party. For others, they are irrational Cowboys lovers who are just about as unrealistic as your typical Alabama football or Kentucky basketball fan. For them, if he's less than Aikman (or, more appropriately, less than Brees, Brady or Rodgers) he's Danny White.

Because a large percentage of NFL fans are either Cowboys lovers or Cowboys haters, that puts a target on his back for a large chunk of the football audience and, to me, drastically alters the general perception of him.

If he puts up the same numbers, and is getting similar W-L records, playing for the Kansas City Chiefs, I doubt if he's any lower than 7-8 on people's QB lists.

 

Just to clarify, my point was that Romo performs just fine in crunch time, it's just when he fails, he fails spectacularly. He doesn't throw an incompletion on fourth down, he fumbles a snap as his team is rolling in for a winning score.

In that regard, he's the Les Miles of quarterbacks. He has a great record, but man has he had his moments where it looks like he has no idea what he's doing.