ARLINGTON, Texas - Now just stop the nonsense, OK? Just stop it.
Stop being so hysterical on a weekly basis.
Stop allowing others to coax you onto the window ledge.
Come on, just stop it.
All this silliness about Wade Phillips' stoic, unemotional style being the reason the Cowboys don't win every game they play.
All the silliness about Jason Garrett having fallen off the turnip truck, landing on his head, evidently the reason every play he calls doesn't work to perfection.
And this nouveaux rage of picking apart Tony Romo limb from limb, overanalyzing the quarterback starting just his third full season in the NFL, and buying into the ridiculous perceptions that he doesn't work hard or he doesn't have enough fun or he is so overrated it isn't funny.
Yeah . . yeah . . . well stick this in your whining pool, because frankly it's become tiresome and petty:
Cowboys 37, Falcons 21, before 81,521 here at the Cowboys Mansion Sunday afternoon.
And in case you missed it, I said Falcons, as in Atlanta Falcons, last year's out-of-nowhere team finishing 11-5 and earning a wild-card bid they almost turned into a first-round playoff victory at Arizona. You know, those Falcons, everyone's favorite to win the NFC South this year.
That same team getting off to a 4-1 start this season, coming here with the chore of inspecting the Dallas Cowboys' 2009 credibility, supposedly going to tell us if they are for real this season or just some 8-8 posers.
Please then comprehend what you saw, OK.
The NFL's No. 1-ranked offense heading into the game put up another 414 yards. The Cowboys put up a season-high 37 points, most scored against the Falcons this year, and that's 11 more than the previous high scored by New England.
Why, after looking in the first quarter as if they had not played a game in two weeks - imagine that - failing to do squat during their first two possessions of the game, the Cowboys went on to score points on six of their next eight possessions.
And this was the third of six games the Cowboys have scored at least 30 points this season.
So what, did Phillips suddenly start ranting and raving on the sideline? Was he some sort of phony, fist-pumping maniac, is that why the Cowboys disassembled the Falcons (4-2) before your very eyes?
Did Garrett like take a correspondence course on offensive football during the two-week bye period, and please don't even try telling me, see, Garrett ran the ball 28 times and the Cowboys won. Hey, nine of those runs came after the Cowboys were up 34-21, when they went into a grinding, clock-draining mode. That means the Cowboys, when the game still was in debate, ran the ball 19 times compared to 28 passing attempts.
Oh, and I guess Romo then worked harder this week, and learned to be a leader, and decided if he smiled some, then that would conquer all.
Do ya understand?
Do you understand just how good Romo is, and was in that game on Sunday afternoon, which Cowboys owner Jerry Jones pressed the issue by calling this "a big game" just six into a season?
"Really good," Garrett said with feeling as he was departing the locker room afterward.
See, the storylines on Sunday involved Miles Austin at least establishing himself as a two-hit wonder, following up his 250-yard, two touchdown NFC Offensive Player of the Week performance against Kansas City with a 171-yard, two touchdown performance against the Falcons while averaging an other-worldly 28.5 yards a catch.
They involved Patrick Crayton, everyone acting as if the Cowboys were making their wide receiver/punt returner walk the darn plank this past week while promoting Austin over him to start at receiver and signing veteran Allen Rossum to return kicks - all putting just enough weighty chip on his shoulder to produce a 73-yard punt return for the put-away touchdown in the fourth quarter and catch the five-yard touchdown pass to give the Cowboys a 17-7 lead six ticks before halftime.
And there was the unyielding pressure the Cowboys put on Atlanta quarterback Matt Ryan - after the first possession of the game, that is - turning him into some Matt Moore, sacking him four times, intercepting him two times and causing him to lose one fumble, all rendering his QB rating to 66.1 and his average per pass attempt to an anemic 4.5 yards.
Yeah, all that.
And Romo? Yawn.
All he did was complete 21 of 29 passes (I could find two drops in those seven incompletions) for 311 yards, three touchdowns, no interceptions and a 141.6 QB rating. These types of performances now are taken for granted, more expected than appreciated, causing those darts of perception to take dead aim after putting up mere human numbers.
That's why I say, stop it.
Do you realize Romo has:
Now won 68.8 percent of the games he's started (31-14).
Established a 25-10 record (71 percent) after going 6-4 as a starter the final 10 games in 2006 when he took over for the benched Drew Bledsoe.
Already thrown for more than 300 yards in half the games this season - the last two straight - stretching his club career record to 19, which means more than Roger Staubach and more than Troy Aikman by a long shot.
Won 16 of those 19, 300-yard passing performances.
Put up three, 100 QB ratings this year, Sunday's 141.6 the third highest of his short career as a starter and highest in the past 27 games, only that 141.7 rating versus Philadelphia in 2007 and his career-high 148.9 against Tampa Bay in 2006 better.
So here is the deal: Tony Ramiro Romo has become a prisoner of the high bar he has set. Because had Romo fumbled that ball down on the five-yard line at the end of the first half instead of ducking out of a potential sack, breaking another tackle and then finding Crayton in the end zone for a touchdown six seconds until intermission, there would have been all this moaning about how he doesn't take care of the football.
Just sit back and enjoy this treat Romo is, and quit judging him from game to game, as if you are evaluating the Texas weather that changes from day to day. Evaluate the whole body of work. A season is 16 games, not one. Quit jumping to hasty conclusions.
Look at Romo after six games, not just the last two passes against Denver when making these absolute evaluations. The Cowboys now are 4-2, finally having won consecutive games for the first time since Games 11 and 12 of last year. He has completed 60.3 percent of his passes so far this year. His touchdown to interception ratio is 9 to 4, meaning he is throwing twice as many touchdown passes as he is interceptions, the barometer of good NFL quarterbacks.
And his QB rating is 94.7, rather remarkable since that 29.6 rating-buster second game of the season, and even at that, let me be the one to remind you even though he was intercepted three times in that game, the Cowboys were leading 31-30 when he left the field.
So relax, appreciate what you're watching, because before you know it, there the Cowboys will be, looking for another franchise quarterback, and likely going through another painful drought as they did the front portion of this decade.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, Romo hasn't won anything yet - as in a playoff game. But you know what, neither has Jason Witten or DeMarcus Ware or Bradie James or Terence Newman, and that doesn't seem to diminish their careers.
But in the now becoming immortal words of No. 9, "This is a process," and you know, he's right. Very rarely do we find microwave-ready quarterbacks in the NFL.
Or as Romo's very objective father Ramiro said one day to me - yes, I did say objective, even if it's his son, he's amazing that way - "He's going through a learning process," and he meant Tony is trying to find a middle ground between unconscionably gun-slinging and being tentatively conservative.
"And I've learned my lesson about never counting him out again," Papa Romo said.
Son understands.
"There's obviously a mix and I've been trying to find it for some time," the younger Romo said of protecting the football, but not to the point of dissolving his innate creativity and ability to make plays. "I think in some ways when you're playing the game at this position the ball is so valuable, you can't give it to the other team, and when you do it's hard to overcome. I've put it the other way before when I've said, 'I'm never going to turn the ball over,' and safe is death as well. If you play too safe you can only be so good - your team and you as an individual.
"I'm in a place where you are going to do certain things to separate yourself as a unit, it's all a process from a team and individual standpoint, and as you get older you slowly learn that."
You also learn as a quarterback not to take yourself too seriously, and to let that game-to-game criticism, with everyone in a rush to define your career, roll down the goose feathers on your back. He is learning that only Tony Romo can define Tony Romo, heaven knows not me, and nor you, either.
So he even dabbled in some self-deprecating humor Sunday after the game, more aware than you might realize how everyone's always digging to unlock the Holy Grail to his performances.
"Actually," Romo said, having problems hiding his self-satisfying inner giggle, "I just broke up with a girl."
See what I mean, hearsay.
Come on, you guys.
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Mickey Spagnola - 
