The Cowboys will be cutting their roster to 53 players on Saturday and we know that quarterback Tony Romo will be on the active roster through that process.
The question the team has to answer is whether he’ll remain on the active roster until he’s cleared to return to action from a broken bone in his back or if they’ll place him on injured reserve before restoring him to active duty. Thanks to a rule change this year, teams can bring one player back from injured reserve without the advanced designation required in previous years, but that move can’t happen until after the cut to 53 players.
If Romo were to go on injured reserve, he’d be out for at least the first eight weeks of the regular season but the Cowboys would be able to keep a player who can help them while Romo recuperates. The Cowboys have a bye in Week Seven, so Romo would miss seven games with a minimum stay on IR.
“We’re certainly getting our hands around it,” Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said, via the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “We’ll be needing to make that decision obviously sometime later in the weekend. Whatever we do with him, he’ll need to be on our 53 when we cut it on Friday. So you’ve got to have him through the 53 cut before you can put him on designated to return, if we wanted to consider that. But it may be that we just keep him on the roster. We’ll just see.”
Their decision will likely be helped by an MRI scheduled for this weekend that will give everyone a better idea of Romo’s chances of returning at the front end of the 6-10 week timeline laid out when he was initially injured.
