Blame Jauron. Don't Credit Romo.

Five picks. One fumble. Tony Romo, the media's new darling, looked more like the ghost of Vinny Testaverde than the league's next Brett Favre. Although in Romo's defense, both the Bills and Cowboys wear blue jerseys. How does a team commit six turnovers (two of which are returned for touchdowns and another occurring in the endzone), give up a special teams score, and still manage to win? Easy, play a team coached by Dick Jauron.

Lets start with the obvious and work our way from there shall we? Third and 12 in your opponent's redzone, up eight with just minutes to play. Your team is desperate for a victory. A field goal makes it an eleven point, two possession game. Time to play "IBM's You Make the Call". Do you... a) run the ball and kick the field goal? b) entrust your rookie QB to make a sound decision and throw the ball? or c) run the bloody ball and kick the frickin' field goal?!?!!??!?! If you chose a or c congrats, you made a sound football decision. If you chose b, either your playing Madden Football and want to run up the score on your buddy, or your Dick Jauron. Offensive coordinator Steve Fairchild, apparently picked ripe from the Tom Walsh coaching tree, calls for a quick out. First off, these plays are ripe for a pick six and secondly, the route wasn't even deep enough to pick up the first down. I imagine the reaction in the huddle when the call came to be something along the lines of the Hoosiers' dejected faces when Gene Hackman wants to use Jimmy Chitwood as a decoy on the final play of the state finals. Lunacy.

Now for the not so obvious, but just as egregious. The field goal attempt just before halftime. The Bills are up 17-7. Their defense has scored two touchdowns, forced four turnovers, and given up just seven points while completely demoralizing one of the leagues most explosive offenses. Lindell's career long is 52 yards, now is not the time to find out if he can set a personal best. I'm a firm believer that psychology is an important factor in sports. If the Bills punt the ball the Cowboys will kneel down and go into halftime down ten. Think about that. The Cowboys will kneel down, reminding everyone in that huddle that the coaches can't trust Romo right now dbecause a turnover on that side of the field could spell disaster. Instead, the field goal is missed. The ball was pushed so far to the right that Jauron would've been better off sending in Daniel Larusso to give it a shot using the crane technique. Dallas gets the ball at the 43, and a few completions and a field goal later its 17-10 at the half. The offense gets some momentum and realize they've played just about as a bad a half of football as a team can play, and are only down seven. Even putting aside the psychological ramifications, do the math, those three points were HUGE.

Defense, Jaurons specialty. Thirteen seconds left, Buffalo just dodged a bullet thanks to a surprisingly correct ruling on replay that showed that TO did not make a potential game stealing catch. I'm thinking Romo has to fling it to the endzone and pray one of his receivers comes down with it. I mean there is no way Buffalo is going to let Dallas complete two short passes to the sideline to move into field goal range right? How does this happen? Buffalo needed to do two things: protect the sidelines and the endzone. They could have left the middle of the field wide open. On the previous play, after completing a pass downfield (the aforementioned TO play) Dallas spiked the ball with only one second remaining. Now with seven fewer seconds, there is no way Romo can complete a pass downfield and have time to spike it. Why bother rushing, just drop everybody into coverage and protect against the 5-10 yard out and the endzone.

Now the Bills are 1-4. They could be 2-3 and riding the wave of an amazing upset win against one of the best teams in the leagues. What could have been a huge stepping stone for a young team is just another loss. One of those "I can't believe we blew it" games that takes teams weeks to recover from. A defeat not at the hands of Tony Romo and the Dallas Cowboys, but through the utter mismanagement of Dick Jauron.