Tony Romo is doing ‘very, very good,’ Jerry Jones says

Drafting Tony Romo’s successor has been a talking point all offseason for the Dallas Cowboys.

Romo recently turned 36, and played in only four games a season ago after fracturing his left collarbone twice. But he has undergone a surgery known as the ‘Mumford’ procedure to reduce further injury risk, and the Cowboys are fully confident he has multiple years of good football in him left.

“We do feel very good with how he is doing. Very, very good,” owner Jerry Jones said. “I like the approach that he took [with the ‘Mumford’ procedure] to eliminate as much as, technically that he could address it, the fracturing of his left shoulder.

“With all that in mind, I couldn’t sit here at all and have told you when they traded up or not, those two teams traded up or not, if we were going to take a quarterback today. And I don’t think I could have told you the morning of the draft.”

Jones went on to mention the risk involved with selecting and developing a quarterback when the organization still feels Romo has good years left. Look no further than the Denver Broncos, who groomed Brock Osweiler to succeed Peyton Manning only to see Osweiler bolt in free agency to the Houston Texans.

Teams only hold the rights to first-round draft picks for up to five years, and four years for any player drafted outside the first round.

“Tony won’t play forever, but you can get real problematic if you brought a quarterback in here, developed him, you saw enough in the next three or four years but he really never got in and played,” Jones said. “Then there he is, as you know, the most that we can probably sign him for would be five if he were the first pick or four later on, at best keeps your rights to him. Well, he is sitting there and he is in the free agent market. And you have a multi-million dollar decision to make and you really haven’t seen him under fire. That could happen.

“That decision might deal you an awkward place 36 months down the road. I like to say in months just to remind me how quick that decision will come, rather than years. So you early or substantively on the quarterback position have a potential, not dilemma, but a real problem ahead.

“No one knows if Tony, or if anyone else on this team, is going to be without injury, without injury that will limit their playing time over the next several years.”

This story was originally published April 25, 2016 at 3:41 PM with the headline "Tony Romo is doing ‘very, very good,’ Jerry Jones says."