Cowboys coach Jason Garrett says he’s happy to take the bad with the good with his quarterback, Tony Romo.
After the Cowboys beat the Eagles on Sunday, Garrett said that he views Romo as a great quarterback because he can improvise and do things when the play breaks down, and there’s no way to rein Romo in without taking away from that. So Garrett is willing to accept the bad plays with the good.
“If you ever get to a point where you’re strangling him and saying, ‘You can’t do that and you can’t do that,’ I think you’re taking away the essence of what makes him a really special player,” Garrett said, via the Dallas Morning News. “You’re going to have some plays that you don’t like, and you have to live with those, and we’ve had a few of those. But at the same time, you have to allow for the other ones. You have to be balanced in how you evaluate it.”
Garrett, who was an NFL quarterback himself, says Romo makes some of his best plays when other quarterbacks would panic.
“The amazing thing with him is he feels so much and then he can see so much while all of this stuff is going on,” Garrett said. “Just having played the position, I know what a melee that whole thing feels like. These guys are all around you like, ‘Where the hell am I?’ You feel like you’re going the wrong way. He just has this great poise about him as an athlete where he can kind of feel what the heck’s going on, and keeps his eyes up and sees what’s going on down the field. It’s pretty unique.”
The problem, however, is that Romo often has more of those plays you don’t like than plays you do: He has more interceptions (13) than touchdown passes (12) this season. There’s nothing “special” about that.