Tony Romo says he doesn’t spend much time dwelling on regrets, but one still lingers from his years with the Dallas Cowboys.
Appearing on the Pardon My Take podcast, Romo said the one thing that sticks with him is never bringing a Super Bowl to Dallas.
"I'm not a guy with big regrets, I guess you could say. The only regret I guess I would have is that... my job was to bring a Super Bowl to Dallas and I didn't do it," Romo said.
"So that always sticks with me a little bit. Because you give your whole body, heart, soul, everything into it."
He said the disappointment goes beyond his own résumé.
"And you just wanted that for... all the fans. The Joneses.
For everybody that you're around," he added. "And so that one always sticks with me a little bit just because I had that opportunity and just wasn't able to do it.
So that part of it kind of still... sits there."
Romo also opened up about the idea of trying to win a title somewhere else, but said a ring outside Dallas would never have carried the same weight for him.
"But at the end it was like... I could go somewhere else and do it.
Because I was like, I gotta win a Super Bowl. It's literally what you play the game for.
Nothing else matters," Romo said. "And it just was like... but would that be the same?
If I went somewhere else and did it?"
"I think just... it was as simple as it just wouldn't feel as... important... it would be important to me, but it was for the people I was around," Romo said. "All the fans that we had."
The numbers show how much Romo meant to Dallas, even without the championship. He went 78-49-0 as the Cowboys’ starter, led the team to the playoffs four times, and helped them win two postseason games. Dallas never got past the Divisional Round with him under center.
That leaves a long list of what-ifs around his career, and the Super Bowl miss remains the biggest one.
Not everyone sees Romo the same way, though. Former New York Giants standout Osi Umenyiora made it clear he thinks Romo never got enough credit for how hard he was to face.
"Tony Romo was the most difficult quarterback we ever faced. He was No.
1," Umenyiora told RJ Ochoa of Blogging With the Boys. "We played against the GOAT, Tom Brady, the greatest of all time.
Played against Peyton Manning.
"But for me personally, my level of respect for Tony Romo, having faced him year in and year out, such an underrated football player. People don't understand the type of headache he was as a player.
They don't give him enough credit. If he would've won the Super Bowl, which he should have, I think things would have been different."
Umenyiora also called Romo "one of the all-time great NFL quarterbacks."
That kind of praise stands out, especially since Romo’s name usually doesn’t get mentioned that way. But Umenyiora saw him up close for years in New York, and his view carries real weight.
In the end, that missing Super Bowl is still the line between Romo being remembered as very good and being remembered as a Cowboys legend without debate.
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