Written by Jared Dubin at CBSSports.com
Imagine you’re an undrafted free agent rookie quarterback out of a Division II school. You had several offers from NFL teams but decided to take the one from the team coached by Bill Parcells, one of the most famously stern and prickly coaches in NFL history. You’re playing in your second preseason game and, after throwing an interception that was overturned by a penalty, you’ve just completed a pass to get the team down to the 1-yard line, down by five points with the clock winding down inside 10 seconds.
What do you do?
If you’re most people on this planet, you spike the ball and set up one final play. But Tony Romo didn’t do this. As Romo and Saints coach Sean Payton (who was the Cowboys’ quarterback coach during Romo’s early years) told The MMQB’s Peter King:
This was Payton’s version of the story the way he told it to me Thursday night: “We’re at Oakland in the [2004] preseason. Fourth quarter, late, and we’re in a two-minute drill, driving, down a touchdown [actually 20-14]. We get down to, like, the one, and Tony’s the quarterback, and the clock’s running down, and Parcells yells, ‘Clock it! Clock it!’ So I tell Tony to clock it, and he runs to the line, and we all think he’s going to clock it. But he calls, ‘98! 98!’ That’s the call for the quarterback sneak.”
… :11, … :10 … :09 … Snap to Romo.
Payton: “So Tony, instead of clocking it, does a Brady-like sneak and somehow he gets over the line, and we end up winning the game. After the game, I couldn’t really say, ‘Great job!’ If he didn’t make it, we’d have both been in trouble. Big trouble.”
“That’s so funny,” Romo told me. “The one thing they didn’t know on that play was I called ‘98’ to quarterback-sneak it, but I was still planning on spiking it. I just wanted the option to sneak it if the defense wasn’t aligned properly. If Oakland would have been aligned right and in their stances with intensity, you have to spike it. But they weren’t. It’s an educated guess I took.”
But if you were wrong?
“I’m pretty sure I’d have been on a bus back to Burlington, Wis., if I wasn’t lucky enough to get in. It was pretty stupid at that stage to risk that. But hell, I was young and dumb.”
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