On Sunday, the Dallas Cowboys avoided what would have been a devastating upset to the Washington Redskins after coming through in overtime for the 27-24 win to improve to 6-4 on the season–which is good enough to be tied with the New York Giants for first place in the NFC East. While the outcome of this game should come as no surprise when comparing the two teams on paper, the Cowboys should consider themselves lucky considering how close Tony Romo was to changing the outcome of the game.
According to David Moore of The Dallas Morning News via Maggie Hendricks of Yahoo! Sports, Romo was on the verge of calling a timeout before Dallas lined up for what ended up being the game-winning 39-yard field goal, but he completely forgot the team’s two timeouts for overtime had already been used. Luckily, Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan called a timeout at the same exact time as Romo–so it worked out well for the Cowboys.
From Moore’s article:
“I think we were out of timeouts,” Romo said. “I noticed that after the fact. And I guess you get two timeouts in overtime, not three.
“The clock was running down there. I was trying to stop it there with one second but they helped us out.”
As Hendricks pointed out, Dallas would have been penalized 15 yards if Romo had tried using a timeout they didn’t have and it could have changed the entire outcome of the game. Considering the Redskins had marched down the field on the previous drive and failed to connect on a 52-yard field goal–Romo should be thankful that Shanahan helped him avoid a costly mistake without even realizing.
*Update: The NFL announced on Monday that Romo wouldn’t have been penalized 15 yards for the incident. As the rules indicate, Romo would have just been hit with a five-yard penalty for a delay of game.
Dan Parzych is the Lead NFL Content Editor for www.RantSports.com/NFL, where he writes and edits NFL content for www.RantSports.com.
Be sure to follow Dan on Twitter @DanParzych
Email Dan: [email protected]
None of your sources know what they’re talking about. The league clarified today; Romo would not have been called for a penalty.
Since when is a delay of game penalty 15 yards? It probably would have been 5 yards but even so it was only 3rd down so the Cowboys had an extra down to get some of the yardage back if they wanted to.
The article states 15 yards if they would have penalized them for calling a time out with no time out’s available. I don’t think its a 15 yard penalty, I think it’s a 5 yard delay of game penalty, but I watched the game andsaw romo call the TO, but in hindsight my Redskins should have won by 3 seeing as how our kicker missed 2 FG in that game!!