Situation Impossible: Tony Romo

Situation Impossible is a weekly column focusing on the most devastating injury of the week in the NFL. “Next Man Up” is a catchy phrase, but some players are harder to replace than others. Here we investigate the alternatives on hand and how a team reacted or will react to having to replace star-level performance.

Read More: Manning-O-Meter, Week 2: Rising Tides

Injured player: Tony Romo, Dallas Cowboys quarterback and mixer of cupcakes and brownies.

Injury and diagnosis: Depending on the source, Romo’s injury has described as either a fractured clavicle or a fractured collarbone. The terms mean the same thing. He is going to be out for a while.

The timetable for returning from a fractured clavicle tends to fall somewhere between 6-10 weeks. The Cowboys have already placed him on IR-designated to return, which means he’ll be eligible to return during Week 11. That’s eight weeks. Don’t be completely surprised if he needs to miss a little more time. Depending on the severity of the fracture, we could see an additional couple of weeks. Of course, the Cowboys in the past haven’t exactly been gun shy about rushing Romo back to duty.

What’s missing: One of the best ten quarterbacks in the NFL. Offensive line mavens talked up the value of Dallas’ line last offseason, but as usual, true value begins and ends with your quarterback. The line put Romo in the best box possible last season and it resulted in incredible efficiency numbers. Without Romo, the running game will be outside of it’s best possible box. Regression is about to hit this unit hard.

Tony Romo, 2013-2015

Year DYAR (Rank) DVOA (Rank)

2013 — 839 (7) 11.5% (10)

2014 — 1,187 (5) 27.6% (3)

2015 — 109 (8) 10.0% (10)

There is no real replacement for losing a player of this caliber for this long in an NFL season. It sucks. Especially given the long-running “is he clutch?” Romo-sports media relationship that entertains America every other Sunday night.

What the team will do: They traded a fifth-round pick for Matt Cassel and a seventh-round pick. At this point, Cassel is the two-year old baking soda box in the back of your fridge. It doesn’t actually help you, but if you’re too lazy to buy a fresh one, it can’t hurt to have it.

The first crack at the starting job will go to former Browns draft bust Brandon Weeden, a first-rounder even though he was already 28 years old. Cowboys general manager/owner/sycophant Jerry Jones has already praised Weeden extravagantly.

“He’s a thing of beauty on throwing a football. His passing motion and his arm, frankly, you won’t see a more gifted passer, power, accuracy, the entire aspect of it. If he can basically prepare, be the starting quarterback, come in and execute and keep his head right, then I feel good about Weeden,” Jones said.

Brandon Weeden will get the first shot at replacing Romo. Photo by James Lang-USA TODAY Sports

Brandon Weeden has a career DYAR of -618 in 825 pass attempts coming into this game. To put that into perspective, Josh McCown has the worst collective DYAR of any quarterback since 1990, and he’s at -1,167 in 1,657 attempts. Part of Weeden’s sample size breaks down into playing with one of the brightest comets of recent NFL past: Josh Gordon’s 2013 season. Brandon Weeden has been quite bad.

X-Factor: With Dez Bryant also out for what looks to be a long period of time, the Cowboys are going to have re-adjust their entire passing game. My speculation is that this will lead to more catches for running back Lance Dunbar.

In the season Weeden started the most games, 2012, the Browns threw at Trent Richardson 70 times. The Cowboys haven’t had much of a reason to use the running back pass in recent history. This is what happens with success and manageable down-distance combinations. Weeden is prone to pocket panic attacks though, and I think the Cowboys will try to manipulate that by giving him a decent dump-off target.

Adjusting our expectations: This has been a tough stretch for Cowboys fans. The Football Outsiders playoff odds, adjusted for Romo’s injury, gives Dallas a 49.1% chance to win the division. This is despite them being a game up on the rest of the division and two games up on New York and Philadelphia.

If Dallas can survive these next eight weeks and get to Week 11 with a 5-4 or 4-5 record, they appear to still be in good shape. But both the Giants and Eagles have underperformed to this point. There’s a chance that one of them could get hot and put Dallas in a hole.

Should Dallas get to the playoffs with a healthy Romo and Dez, they’ll be an interesting foil for the rest of the NFC. That’s not a team you want to see as a visitor in the Divisional Round.