Cowboys: The Future Is Now At Quarterback Position

The Dallas Cowboys entered 2015 feeling confident at the quarterback position, but they’ll certainly be thinking otherwise entering 2016 as tomorrow has arrived.

The last time the Dallas Cowboys were sitting where they are today concerning their franchise quarterback was December 10, 2000. The weather was cool and the skies clear when this storied franchise unknowingly stepped into tomorrow.

The Cowboys had just four wins on the season and would cruise to an easy victory, just their fifth on the year, over the Washington Redskins at Texas Stadium.

Midway through the first quarter, eventual Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman rolled to his right and fired an incomplete pass into the end zone just before before getting decked by Washington Redskins linebacker LaVar Arrington, one of the biggest hitters in the NFL at the time.

Nobody knew it then, but after leaving the field following that play, Aikman never again set foot into an NFL huddle, the Cowboys releasing the face of their franchise over the previous 11 years just a few months later.

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What followed was an odyssey of failed attempts to replace Aikman by a team void of either salary cap space or a first round pick in the 2001 NFL Draft – you know that Drew Brees could have very well been Dallas’ future quarterback if not for the Joey Galloway trade in the winter of 2000?

Well, here we are again, only this time it’s 15 years into the future, minus just a couple of weeks.

Since 2006, Tony Romo has been the face of the Dallas Cowboys franchise, the first quarterback to earn that distinction since Aikman. Romo has set records, won many games and established himself as one of the NFL’s top quarterbacks over the last several seasons.

However, Romo has also suffered numerous injuries, which at this point includes back issues and broken bones above the waist. There’s also been an injured thumb, a punctured lung and the steady diet of hits to the head that go with the territory of the quarterback position at football’s highest level.

On Thanksgiving Day, Romo apparently re-injured the same collar bone that he broke during a Week 2 contest against the Philadelphia Eagles earlier this season.

According to ESPN’s Todd Archer, Romo is expected to miss the remainder of the regular season as a result of the most recent collar bone injury sustained against the Carolina Panthers on Thanksgiving Day.

The Cowboys are likely to finish the season with a record of somewhere between 3-13 and 5-11, both marks lower than anything seen in Dallas since 2002, the final year of the Dave Campo administration which saw 5-11 records in all three seasons.

Barring an incredible run by a backup quarterback unheard of since the days of Steve Beuerlein all the way back in 1991, the playoffs seem like a clear impossibility for the Cowboys in ’15. Instead, a top-10 draft choice in the 2016 NFL Draft next spring seems far more likely.

If that latter prediction comes true, it also means two selections within the top 40 picks, which is a clear invitation to finally grab a future franchise quarterback prospect to groom with a bit of urgency that might not have been expected just 32 months ago. That’s when Romo signed his most recent contract extension with the Cowboys, a move that was immediately followed by numerous back procedures and a few other injuries of relatively insignificant nature.