Tony Romo might be a splash signing, but he won't deliver a Super Bowl | Les Carpenter

For the next few days, the former face of the Dallas Cowboys will tour the NFL looking for his new home. Presumably the only criterion for Tony Romo and the teams who might wish to sign him is a Super Bowl. As if Tony Romo is the difference between a Super Bowl or not.

There are a lot of reasons why it doesn’t make sense for someone to invest in a soon-to-be quarterback who has thrown just 125 passes the last two seasons. Romo has broken a collarbone and his back in the previous two years, and seems increasingly brittle as he gets older. But the biggest Romo issue for the Super Bowl seekers is that nothing in his 13 NFL seasons says he is a Super Bowl quarterback.

He has forever been November’s quarterback, putting up gorgeous regular-season statistics only to stumble in the most important games. By now the ledger of Romo failings in the big-game glow is well-known. The fumbled snap on a game-winning field goal in the 2007 playoffs. The interception at the end of a home playoff defeat to New York the next fall. The fateful lob to Dez Bryant that was intercepted late in the last game of the 2012 season costing the Cowboys the NFC East.

In the summer of 2013, I stood on a practice field with one of Romo’s strongest defenders, a man who loved Romo’s passion, enthusiasm and football mind. The man raved about his desire and preparation. Nobody, he said, worked harder. Nobody cared more. Nobody tried as much. Then the man was asked about the playoff blunders, the silly mistakes. The man shook his head. His lips tumbled into a sad frown.

Romo’s one great flaw, the guy said, was that he’d try to do too much in those instances. He would force throws that didn’t need to be made. The quarterback who spent so much of his time preparing for every situation would slip out of his study for just those few brief seconds.

The most essential seconds of those seasons.

It was the only thing Romo had to fix, he said.

If Super Bowls could be won on a quarterback’s mind alone, Romo would have a fistful of rings. The team that gets Romo will be getting a brilliant observer of offenses, another offensive coordinator, really. In later years, the Cowboys coaches trusted Romo to help install their system, realizing that few quarterbacks could devour other team’s offenses, see how they matched against defensive trends and apply them to Dallas’s approach.

Not many NFL quarterbacks roll into the dreary January and February coaches’ meetings, carrying computers loaded up with bright ideas for the team’s offense. Romo knows football in a way for which he does not get credit. He is a good team-mate. He is a good leader. He does not trash his fellow players.

He is also incredibly tough. The fact he has missed almost all of the last two seasons as well as the end of the 2013 with significant injuries should not overshadow the pain he has endured without complaint. Watching him limp gingerly through a locker room, post-game, is agony in itself. Other players understand this. They know the beatings he has taken at the expense of an often-flimsy Dallas line over the years.

“That’s my quarterback,” Terrell Owens said in defense of Romo after the 2007 playoff loss to the Giants. As Owens said this, tears rolled down his face. Romo might have a pretty image, but he also has the players’ respect.

But if Romo’s most logical suitors, the Broncos and Texans, believe he is the one to lead them to a Super Bowl, they are likely being more hopeful than wise. The Romo of his early 30s was once good. Very good. He has thrown for 4,000 yards four times in his career, and has come close in two other seasons. He has given flawed Cowboys offenses an explosiveness they shouldn’t have had. And yet even in those years he was never able to take Dallas to more than two playoff victories. He has never come close to sniffing the Super Bowl.

Five years ago, Peyton Manning took a similar tour around the NFL. This was after the neck surgery that had kept Manning out of the entire 2011 season. Manning was 35, a year younger than Romo is now, with a body that had taken a beating, too. There were significant questions about whether Manning would be healthy enough to be Peyton Manning again. Still, there were teams willing to take the risk, and so Manning went to Denver, Miami and Arizona before picking the Broncos. The gamble turned out right for Denver. Manning led them to two Super Bowls, winning the second one in his final game last year.

Romo’s tour will have some of the same drama. Wherever he goes he will be hailed as a savior. If he chooses the Broncos, with their ferocious defense, he might be seen as another Manning, pulling Denver to another Super Bowl while the Broncos continue their search for a franchise quarterback of their own. But even when healthy, Romo has never been Manning. He may have shared Manning’s obsessive devotion to preparation, but on the field they are not the same. Manning is one of the greatest quarterbacks to play the game. Romo is very good but not elite.

In a league where the Patriots and Tom Brady remain the dominating force, signing Tony Romo won’t bring a quick Super Bowl. It will be a spectacle with a lot of cameras, a big smile and a whole lot of almost.