Romo says Eagles, not balky back to blame for poor outing

ARLINGTON, Texas - The Eagles have faced Dallas quarterback Tony Romo enough to know what to expect - a swashbuckling escape artist who can avoid the rush and throw laser-accurate passes down the field.

What they saw instead during yesterday's 33-10 thrashing of the Cowboys at AT&T Stadium wasn't even close.

Romo, who has been battling a balky back all season, was wildly inaccurate, sailing throws high past open receivers and firing balls up for grabs at times. And, most shocking, they watched the normally elusive scrambler give himself up for sacks on two occasions.

"Shoot, I don't know what injury he has, but you could just tell - a couple plays, he was just falling down," Eagles outside linebacker Brandon Graham said. "I guess they were telling him to do that. Whenever we got close, he just jumped right to the ground . . . He's got that nice, little spin move, [but] he wasn't doing that too much today. I think he was in a little pain."

Not that anyone in the Cowboys locker room would acknowledge it. Romo has been on a limited practice schedule ever since he underwent offseason surgery to repair a herniated disk, and his situation worsened in Week 8, when a sack against Washington fractured two small bones in his back called the transverse process.

Romo sat out one game and has played with the injury since then. It hadn't seemed to affect his performance before, but yesterday, playing in a short week with little recovery time from Sunday night's game against the Giants, he was noticeably wobbly.

He wound up completing 18 of 29 passes for 199 yards with two interceptions, both on poorly thrown balls, and a passer rating of 53.7. He also failed to throw a touchdown pass for the first time since Sept. 23, 2012, ending a streak of 38 consecutive games with one - the fifth-longest TD pass streak in NFL history.

But the back and the short week, he said, were not the problem. The Eagles were.

"There are no excuses," Romo said. "They made things difficult. I missed a couple throws I normally won't miss. I'll be better at that the rest of the year. I know that, for sure.

"It's disappointing, obviously, but you've got to give them credit. They pushed the pocket and did some things to make things a little more challenging. It was really about execution - just dropping back, throwing, catching and blocking. We didn't block well enough, we didn't catch well enough, we didn't throw well enough."

Romo brushed off a question about whether he had been given a painkilling injection to be able to play.

"Well, you're always taking stuff, but that's not an excuse," he said. "That would be doing a disservice to the way the Eagles played to say it was about something else."

Cowboys coach Jason Garrett sounded less sure about his quarterback's condition, falling back more than once on that coach's crutch, "We'll go back and look at the tape."

"All indications all week long were that he came out of the game [at New York] clean," Garrett said. "You can try to create a lot of different reasons for why things didn't work out well for our football team. What we're going to do is watch the tape. We're going to evaluate everybody."

Still, Garrett didn't need to wait for the tape to be able to see Romo wasn't his usual self.

"It seemed in different situations, he wasn't as comfortable in the pocket," the coach said. "We just didn't have the rhythm we've had in recent weeks, both running it and throwing it."

It didn't help that the Cowboys fell behind early and trailed big in the second half, putting the burden of the offense squarely on him, rather than shifting much of the load to the NFL's leading rusher, DeMarco Murray.

That also allowed the Eagles to turn up the heat on the pass rush - they recorded three of their four sacks after halftime, which, of course, creates more injury concerns.

"Playing the position he plays in situations like that, sometimes he might be more vulnerable," Garrett said. "But that's part of the job. That's part of the dinner. He understands that."

As for the self-takedowns, Romo said one was the product of the play called. Because only two receivers were out on the pattern, he said, when the pass wasn't there on the initial read, he knew no one would be coming open when the pocket broke down.

"Part of it was, OK, look to move, there's nowhere to go and it's going to end poorly if you're trying to throw with a lot of people around you," he explained. "I thought there was a guy coming, and I was probably wrong. That was a concession, but it was because of the way the defense guarded the play more than anything else."

The rush wasn't an issue on perhaps Romo's worst throw, a third-quarter interception by Cary Williams on which the quarterback badly overthrew open wide receiver Terrance Williams on a sideline comeback route.

But while Williams acknowledged the pass wasn't near where it was supposed to be, he also took the blame for the turnover.

"We've got to continue to help out Tony," Williams said. "It's one of those things where I should have reacted and swatted it down. It kind of was my fault. It wasn't his fault . . . I should have been there to swat it down.

"The more we communicate with Tony about the stuff we're seeing and the better we get in tune with his presnap stuff, we'll be fine. We just have to help him out more."

The good news for Romo is that the Cowboys have a whole week before their next game, a Thursday nighter at Chicago, then a 10-day break before facing the Eagles again on Dec. 14.

"It's going to be nice to have this break after the next game," Romo said. "That will be a bonus. You always want more time, but that's not an excuse . There's no excuse with a short week. We should have been better. I should have been better. I'm going to play much better next week, I promise you that."