Quarterback Tony Romo could miss up to eight weeks with a fractured left clavicle, suffered in the first half of Monday night’s loss to the New York Giants. If recent history is any indicator, this is bad. Very, very bad.
Granted, Jon Kitna is probably better now than Brad “Ol’ Sweatpants” Johnson was in 2008, the last time Romo was forced to miss multiple regular season games with an injury. But with a daunting slate of match-ups staring the team in the face, it seems unlikely that a Kitna-led Cowboys team will fare much better than did the Romo-led group--whose mark currently sits at 1-5.
The last time Romo missed time with an injury was in 2008, the result of a broken pinkie finger on his throwing hand. The pinkie forced Romo to miss three weeks--and what a long three weeks they were.
With Johnson at the helm, Dallas opened up the Romo-less stretch with an embarrassing, 34-14 loss to the miserable St. Louis Rams on the road. This loss becomes all the more embarrassing when one considers that (a) the Rams went 2-14 that season and (b), after the win over Dallas, the team wouldn’t win another game until week 8 of the 2009 season, against the Detroit Lions.
The next week, the team hosted the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and actually won, 13-9. But the effort was far from encouraging.
In week 9, Dallas traveled to the Meadowlands to face the New York Giants. In a game that saw Johnson benched in favor of third-stringer Brooks Bollinger--who now makes his home in the UFL--the Giants whipped the Cowboys roundly, 35-14.
All told, in the three weeks that Romo was gone, the Cowboys were outscored by opponents 78-41--and two of these teams were really, really bad. What this says about the Cowboys’ chances in the coming eight weeks or so, we can't know exactly--but it's not good.
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