Throwdowns > Closed

Marlins Fan said 06/29, 09:59 PM
There are two reason why I believe the Cowboys would NOT have won all three of those Super Bowls Antonio Ramiro Romo had been the starting QB in that era. I'm going to list my reasons first and then I'll expand on them.

Reason 1: Romo wasn't a good fit for those Cowboys teams. The 90's Cowboys were a run-first team and featured a HEAVY dose of Emmitt Smith and LITTLE bit of Aikman doing what he did best - game management.

Romo is a gunslinger, ala Brett Favre. A gunslinger can't do a game manager's job effectively. A gunslinger's mentality is just too different. QBs like Romo or Favre want to throw the ball all day; they want to go deep frequently; they want to take chances with the football.

The 90's Cowboys weren't built for that. They were built for clock management and a punishing run game. It's why Michael Irvin was so successful in that system; he wasn't a deep threat at all, but he knew how to go over the middle and make short catches for first downs.

Romo would've aired it out and turned the ball over enough that the Cowboys would've had a very hard time playing catch up with other teams.

Reason 2: Romo falls apart in the postseason. Much more on that later.

Marlins Fan said 07/01, 02:21 AM
I happen to see this topic completely differently than you do, so that works out very well. In my opinion the Patriots would've been just as successful with Peyton, meaning the NE organization would still have those three SB trophies on display in their facilities.

Let's talk about why. The NE Patriots are as good a system as you will find in the NFL. Granted they've also been slessed with smart talent evaluators and wise waiver moves, but beyond that the real strength of the Patriots is in Belichick's flawless offensive system. Take, for example, the 2008 season. The Pats lost Tom Brady, the reigning MVP, to a season-ending injury. Some teams, like the 2011 Colts for example, fall apart when their MVP/QB misses the year. Not the Pats. Backup/unknown QB Matt Cassel stepped in and guided the Pats to an 11 win season in Brady's absence.

The previously mentioned 2011 Colts, on the other hand, floundered when Peyton went down for the year, finishing the season with a record of 2-14 after coming off a 10 win season the previous year.

The reason for this disparity in handling adversity is the respective systems.

Peyton would've won 3 SBs in NE's system, guaranteed.

Marlins Fan said 07/02, 01:26 AM
Romo's career INT percentage is low because Jason Garrett's scheme plays to Romo's strengths. They pass like crazy and they use multiple WR/TEs on virtually every play. That's exactly the problem... if you put Romo in Jimmie Johnson's run-heavy scheme, the margin for error is significantly lower because they relied on consistency over big plays. Romo always tried to make something out of nothing, and in a big play offense, it works. In a clock-managing, mistake-free, run-for-three-yards-at-a-crack offense, the risk is greatly increased and the penalty for mistakes is much more severe.

Your stat about Belichick's record without Brady is misleading. It involves games long before Belichick's system was perfected. The Pats' 2008 season (without Brady) is a much more current and accurate measuring stick of the success of Belichick's system.

And if we're led to believe that the 2008 Pats' success was due to the Pats developing Cassel, then explain why Cassel turned into a complete scrub once he left NE. He wasn't developed in NE; he had a great SYSTEM in NE.

Manning is talented/smart enough that he would've fit right in to Belichick's system and won 3 SBs.