After Tony Romo suffered yet another back injury during last month's Cowboys-Seahawks preseason game will sideline him for 6 to 10 weeks, Jerry Jones still has not put Romo on the injured reserve.
Why? According to The Star-Telegram, Jones made a statement during his weekly radio show that airs on 105.3 The Fan that shows he thinks Romo could be capable of returning after eight weeks for the Nov. 6 game against the Browns. Jones seemingly doesn't believe in the general timeframe:
“I think that medicine can fail you when you start really creating these bright lines, and we found that over the years when they say it takes six weeks; it takes this. We learned that with [Jason] Witten [and his spleen injury]. In his case, it was supposed to be a length of time and turns out it wasn’t. So some of these kinds of things that have been around, these traditional healing times aren’t necessarily as bright lined as you might like them to be."
Jones also acknowledged Romo's impact on the team, even while not playing 100 percent healthy: "His importance to us is being able to play a game, a half, is really kind of unique. So we’ll be real liberal when we start evaluating when it is he’ll come back."
As the team is finalizing its roster for the 53rd spot, Jones mentioned that a player would take Romo's spot but would remain inactive on gameday:
"I don’t want to rule out anything. I don’t know that anybody is qualified to do that. Medicine basically gives you estimates and guidelines, and I’m not trying to be vague here, but there’s no need to rule out anything. We don’t have a situation on the 53, this isn’t an active roster day-game situation. He won’t be active, and we don’t have anybody valuable enough to take up that last spot to give us the opportunity to see how he does. There’s just not enough value there realistically to bring someone else in. That’s the deciding factor."
As for Romo being placed on the injured reserve, that's a different story. Jones even used a weird analogy involving a, err, mosquito's circumcision:
“You don’t have to spend a lot of time going over and kind of circumcising the mosquito. You don’t have to do that over there on him because you look back over on the other side that caused you to make the decision, and there’s nobody good enough to take that spot to give you a chance for that if he can come back.”
It sounds like Jones made up that analogy on the spot. If you understood his strange brand of logic, that in and of itself explains his approach to Romo's injury.
