Over the course of the Tony Romo era—in other words, from 2007 to the present—the Cowboys have employed several different quarterbacks to back up Romo. In 2007-08, former Super Bowl winner Brad Johnson held the clipboard; Johnson was replaced by Jon Kitna, who held the back-up role from 2009-11; in 2012, Kyle Orton became the primary QB reserve. After a nasty rift in the quarterback room led to Orton demanding his release during the 2014 offseason, the team tabbed the more collegian Brandon Weeden as Romo's number two.
Prior to enlisting Weeden, Dallas' back-up signal callers fit a familiar profile: aging former starters who had enjoyed success but no longer had sufficient game—or upside—to prompt an NFL club to offer them a starting position. By the time he came to Dallas in 2007, Johnson had played for three teams in thirteen years, thrown for more than 28,000 yards, logged 120 starts, and had earned a Super Bowl ring in 2002, while with Tampa Bay. Kitna had started 115 games before his arrival in Dallas, throwing for more than 27,000 yards and 150 touchdowns. In his seven years in the league, Orton played with three teams, throwing for almost 15,000 yards and notching 80 aerial scores.
Moreover, all three men had experience winning games. Before signing with the Cowboys, Johnson had already carved 71 victory notches in his belt. Kitna came to Dallas with 46 career wins, and Orton has a respectable 35 victories in his 69 career starts. A back-up quarterback's primary responsibility is to keep the ship afloat when the starter goes down; this means he needs to win at roughly a .500 clip. While none of these men were world-beaters back when they were starters, each had demonstrated the ability at the very least to fulfill the back-up's prerogative: win about as much as you lose.
In Romo's absence, each essentially accomplished this goal. In 2008, when Romo went down with a broken finger, Johnson started three games and, although he played poorly, eked out a 1-2 record while Romo healed. In 2010, Romo broke his collarbone early in game six and was sidelined for the remainder of the season. Kitna guided the team to a 4-5 record (and Stephen McGee was 1-0) the rest of the way. In 2013, when Romo hurt his back in the season's penultimate game, Orton was forced into duty for the finale; although the Cowboys lost, he acquitted himself well enough to allow the team a chance to win at the end. From 2007-13, Romo missed fourteen games and his back-ups went 6-8 in his absence; that's about as good as might reasonably be expected.
Brandon Weeden presented a very different career profile before signing with the Cowboys. He was not a seasoned veteran, having played only two years and started but 20 games. In those games, he emerged victorious on only five occasions, throwing for a third of the yards that Orton had totaled in his pre-Dallas career (and a much smaller fraction of the yardage totals amassed by Johnson and Kitna). Whether the Cowboys signed Weeden because the Orton holdout caught them with their proverbial pants down, because they wanted to save money at the position, or because of a philosophical shift, the bald truth is that they decided the last two seasons to go with a much less seasoned back-up.
In the short-term, with a good team, this might not matter. If Romo were to miss only a game or two, the thinking goes, having an inexperienced back-up isn't going to derail the entire season. Weeden went 0-1 in relief of Romo in 2014, and the Cowboys still cruised to a 12-4 mark and a division championship. But when it became clear that Romo was going to miss as many as eight games, the entire landscape changed; with an inexperienced back-up under center, the season could be lost before Number Nine returned to the lineup. And that's why, on the Tuesday after Romo's injury, the Cowboys traded for Matt Cassel.
And now, Cassel will be their starter until Romo returns. I want to be clear here: the quarterback switch isn't about talent. Cassel is not more talented than Weeden; indeed, in terms of arm strength and overall athleticism, he's less talented, perhaps much less so. But this is his eleventh NFL season; in that time, he's won 91 games and thrown 96 touchdown passes. In short, Cassel's career looks a lot more like Johnson's, Kitna's and Orton's than it does Weeden's. More importantly, he's seen nearly everything that defensive coordinators can throw at a QB; he should be able to recognize patterns and to process information more rapidly that a younger quarterback who is still learning to understand what he's seeing.
If Cassel is the long-term solution, why didn't he start any of the last three games, all losses? My guess is that the Cowboys brain trust looked at the road ahead of them as they made the trade and, from that moment, planned for Cassel to spend three weeks learning the offense and to take the reins during the bye week. In effect, Weeden was the short-term bridge to the long-term solution; the hope at Valley Ranch was that he could win a game or two while the team got its experienced veteran up to speed. But even if he had led the team to victory in two of the three games, I suspect that Cassel would have been the signal caller against the Giants.
Again, that's not because he is necessarily better than Weeden; it's because he's seen more. And that's what the Cowboys want from their starters, even if they're back-ups.
