Cowboys Jerry Poppins On Dak/Romo: Beyond The Glory Hole And Down The Rabbit-Hole
By Mike Fisher
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FRISCO (105.3 The Fan) - At the risk of mixing my metaphors from two beloved British tales featuring female protagonists …
Jerry Poppins is taking us Beyond his Glory Hole to his Rabbit Hole.
On Tuesday morning, Cowboys boss Jerry Jones joined "Shan & RJ'' on 105.3 The Fan and addressed the Tony Romo/Dak Prescott situation in a delightfully convoluted manner. Schedules were turned into pretzels, timetables were twisted into knots, paths morphed into head-on collisions of illogic and misinformation.
"The thing is,'' Jones said, "I don't want to speculate what we're going to do when the time comes."
And we could just leave it at that. But …
When questioned about Romo's readiness beyond this week in Cleveland and instead for the Pittsburgh game, Jerry said, "I do think unquestionably Tony is going to be ready to go for us at some point near the end of the year and we'll be able to evaluate things at that time."
"End of the year''? That sounds like a "new'' and pushed-back timetable …
Unless you look at your calendar and see that over the course of 12 months, Nov. 13 (the date of Dallas at Steelers) is indeed "near the end of the year.''
OK, but what about just "riding the hot hand,'' a phrase Jones has used in regard to Prescott, the QB of record during Romo's rehab and Dallas' 6-1 climb?
"We've got a lot of chemistry going,'' said Jones, seemingly nodding his head to the "hot-hand theory.'' "That has got to be really recognized if you're making a decision."
So there you go. It's hot hand, right?
Said Jones: "We'll evolve. Certainly there will be a lot of input getting with the medical, the doctors. They'll have a lot to say about this. Tony will have tremendous amount of input. He'll have a lot to say about it.''
Errr, so Tony Romo will help determine whether Dak Prescott gets to play in front of Tony Romo? Doesn't that seem obvious, then, that Romo would vote for himself over Dak?
"He wants his team to have all the success it can possibly have,'' Jerry said. "Dak feels the same way...We'll just play it out."
And in the end, "We'll just play it out'' — a mindset first revealed by Jones on Oct. 16 after the win in Green Bay — is the only true, absolute philosophical shift from the "It's Tony's Team'' mantra of earlier.
And even that must factor in Romo's health, the team's desire to know what it has in Romo to gain intel on its future cap decisions, the concept that Dak is inferior overall as a QB to the veteran star, a question of chemistry for a team that clearly is inspired by Prescott, the possibility that "momentum'' could he halted at any time and then re-started with either QB, and even the idea that Romo is actually the "hottest hand'' of all once he gets his hands back on a football.
Shan and RJ did a fine job here. But Lewis Carroll and P.L. Travers would've been handy co-hosts for this trip with Jerry Poppins: Beyond The Glory Hole and Down The Rabbit-Hole.
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