No Romo: Another season slips away in Dallas

At some stage during the heavenly, comically high trajectory of Matt Cassel’s second interception on Sunday in New Jersey, Tony Romo, Dez Bryant and the Dallas Cowboys probably realised that their season was approaching irretrievable.

The Cowboys have lost four games on the trot and sit at 2-4 in the basement of the NFC East. It’s a testament to the ineptitude of their division that they’re still only 1.5 games out of first place.

But the Cowboys host Seattle next week and still have games to come in Lambeau Field against Green Bay, away to the resurgent Dolphins, home to the unbeaten Panthers and shockingly decent Jets, and a crucial divisional clash in a fortnight against the Eagles.

The rest of the games on their schedule aren’t walkovers either – away to Buffalo and a pair of matches against Washington. At Tampa Bay is the only game the Cowboys would expect to win, but at the same time, Cassel on the road is a game nobody should expect to win.

There is little doubt that if they were healthy the Cowboys would be the best team in the NFC East. They have one of the best offensive lines in the league, elite talent at quarterback, wide receiver and tight end, and a surprisingly feisty defence masterminded by the warlock Rod Marinelli. This should be an 11-5 or 12-4 team, just like they were last year.

In the NFL you can’t compensate for losing your two best players though. Losing your quarterback is effectively a death sentence, and when your superstar wide receiver goes down with him, there is no respite from the guillotine.

Romo isn’t due back until Week 11 and Bryant is likely a fortnight away. The Cowboys are going to have to steal one of their next two games against Seattle or Philadelphia, and given what we saw from Cassel on Sunday, that seems like a tall order.

Bad quarterback play is like modern art. It’s incomprehensible but you can’t take your eyes off it. The Cassel Calamity in Jersey had everything you would want from a terrible quarterback performance. The problem with Brandon Weeden is that he isn’t good enough to accentuate the awfulness. He doesn’t take risks, throwing just two picks in four games, and aside from one incredible drive against New Orleans, there was nothing to ignite hope.

Cassel is a different case. He can actually make great throws. A 35 yarder to Jason Witten in tight traffic just before half-time. The centimetre perfect touchdown pass falling down to Devin Street to tie the game with seven minutes to play. Throws like these make you believe that there is light on the other side. In effect though, all they do is lull you into a false comfort, making sure that when the darkness comes, and it will, it will be all the more crushing.

Cassel’s first interception might not have been his fault, although it wasn’t a great throw (and it was returned for a touchdown). The third one wasn’t reprehensible but it was bad. The second one was just magnificent though. It’s rare that you see a throw so deplorable that you have to rewind to make sure that it actually happened.

The comedy of errors didn’t stop there. The fourth quarter saw Cassel hit an unaware Cole Beasley in the head on a pass over the middle, causing Beasley to literally recoil in fright. Then, for reasons unknown, Cassel decided to check down on fourth and eight on the game’s decisive play.

This isn’t Cassel’s fault. He’s been close to the worst quarterback in the league over the past five years, going 10-21 and throwing 37 interceptions to 31 touchdowns. The Cowboys knew what they were getting into.

The Weeden/Cassel era is just another chapter in Dallas’s incredible run of misfortune over the past decade. From the Romo fumble in Seattle to the botched call against Bryant in the playoffs last season, and all the week 17 divisional losses in between, Dallas has become synonymous with despair.

The Cowboys will likely be 2-6 in a fortnight, staring down the barrel of another lost season. Their quarterback is injury prone and an old 35. Their salary cap situation, while less hellish than in years past, is not promising.

The reasons for Dallas’s misfortune are numerous. When you take a stars and scrubs approach to building a team, you lose the opportunity to diversify risk, and the Cowboys are dealing with the realities of those risks coming to life, and their names are ‘Matt’ and ‘Brandon’.

Maybe this is all karma for signing Greg Hardy, who continues to do an impressive job as the evil clown prince of football.

The fact is that in the NFL if you don’t have an elite quarterback, you’re virtually assured of being a nobody in the context of the league. Without a top 10 quarterback you need an elite supporting cast – see Cincinnati and, depressingly, Denver – and the Cowboys forfeited that possibility with their roster construction.

No quarterback, no hope. That’s life in the NFL, and right now, that’s life in Texas.