Leaving Dallas as great player but not NFL

It wasn’t Brady vs. Manning but Eli vs. Romo was the best rivalry going for a long time in the NFC East, and now, unfortunately, it’s over. Well, it’s over at least for now, given the one percent chance Romo places on a comeback if a QB-needy team calls during the season. The Cowboys’ all-time leader in yards, touchdown passes and QB rating announced his retirement Tuesday and will replace Phil Simms as the lead football analyst for CBS.

Romo was never Roger Staubach or Troy Aikman for the Cowboys, which in Dallas means he never reached super-hero status. Staubach won two Super Bowls, Aikman won three. Romo won two playoff games in only four trips to the postseason and never made it to the NFC Championship Game.

But he sure had some memorable showdowns with Manning in the last 10 years.

“The relationship with Eli has been – and I communicate with Eli from time-to-time – one of my favorite relationships in the NFL,” Romo said Tuesday on a conference call. “I feel like there was a friendly rivalry that extended on the field. Eli has been so good for over a decade that I had to play really good ball to beat him. It just went back and forth, the games always came down to wire and it came down to a possession. I feel like I had to play per- fect ball because he was such a good player.”

They faced each other 16 times in the regular season and once in the playoffs after Bill Parcells benched Drew Bledsoe and went to Romo midway through the 2006 season.

Romo won 10 times, Manning won six. But Manning won the most important game when he outplayed Romo in the 2007 divisional round of the playoffs in Dallas when the Cowboys were the No. 1 seed. Manning then went on to win his first Super Bowl.

“He made me a better player. That’s a testament to how great a player he is,” Romo said. “He’s still going and I think he’s got some good years ahead of him. It will be fun to call one of his games one day.”

Then Romo attempted to get in a good-natured dig at Manning.

“Here’s a good one for one: I was lucky enough to beat him in the last five games that I played with him,” he said. “So go ahead and tell him I said that. You can tell him he got me early and I got him late.”

But, I pointed out to Romo, that Manning got him in their one playoff game.

“You had to add that,” he said laughing.

In their head-to-head matchups, Manning had 39 TDs, 20 INTs and 5,140 yards passing. In the playoff game he had two TDs, 0 INTs and 160 yards. Romo had 40 TDs and 20 INTs and 4,639 yards in the regular season games and one TD, one INT and 201 yards in the playoff game. The numbers could not get much closer.

Romo was a great player for a long time, an undrafted free agent found during the Parcells years in Dallas, convinced by offensive coordinator Sean Payton to take less money from the Cowboys than he could have received from the Cardinals or Broncos and he went on to be the best quarterback of this generation never to get to the Super Bowl.

Whether it was a fumbled snap of a game-winning field goal in the 2006 wild-card playoff game in Seattle, which turned out to be the final game of Parcells’ coaching career, or the badly timed trip to Cabo with Jessica Simpson that created a big distraction before the 2007 playoff loss to the Giants, or Dez Bryant’s catch-no-catch in the 2014 playoffs in Green Bay just as Romo had the Cowboys positioned to beat Aaron Rodgers and the Packers, or whether it was the multiple gamelosing fourth quarter interceptions or the debilitating injuries that ruined the last few years of career – well, Romo was always a compelling and tragic figure.

He played the most visible and important position in all of sports. He was the Dallas Cowboys quarterback.

Romo lost his job to rookie Dak Prescott last season after suffering a compression fracture in his back in a preseason game, knew Jerry Jones was not going to give him a chance to compete to win his job back in 2017 and, after months of speculation, he decided to retire rather than either be traded or released and trying finish off his career with another team. He decided not to be Peyton Manning with the Broncos or pick up and move 250 miles down to Houston and try to make a run with the Texans. He will be 37 on April 21, has two small children, his wife is