Aaron Cohen INC@NYU

Romocalypse

You saw what happened in the Cowboys-Jets game on Sunday night. For the sake of Cowboys fans with heart problems, we don’t need to rehash it. What is worth noting, though, is the specific height from which the Cowboys fell. To measure that, we can use the win probability charts created by Brian Burke at his Advanced NFL Stats site. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, it’s simple to explain: Given a particular scoreline, field position, down, and distance to go with a certain amount of time left in the game, how often does the team in the lead win?

This is where those aforementioned Cowboys fans might want to skip ahead a paragraph. When Felix Jones ran the ball in from a yard out with 14:50 left in the fourth quarter, it gave the Cowboys a 24-10 lead and a win probability of 96 percent. Ninety-six percent! A Jets touchdown brought those odds down a bit, but as Tony Romo took the snap on third-and-goal from the two-yard line with a one-score lead and 9:15 left, the Cowboys were still at 94 percent. And even after the two teams traded turnovers, the Cowboys were still at a win probability of 95 percent during the third-and-long that immediately preceded the game-tying blocked punt. After the Cowboys moved the ball into the red zone on the opening drive, their chances of winning did not dip below 60 percent until the Cowboys punted with 2:16 left. They were at 66 percent when the Jets punted the ball away, but Romo obviously threw that down the drain with his mystifying throw to Darrelle Revis.

Did Romo blow the game? Probably. But we would have suggested the same thing about Mark Sanchez if things had gone slightly differently. Sanchez really hung in well during a tough first half that saw the Cowboys’ pass rush barrel down on him, and he made some great throws during the team’s comeback. But he fumbled inside Cowboys territory with six minutes left in a one-score game, and it came on a play in which he simply held the ball for too long. After the blocked punt tied up the game, Sanchez took another sack on third-and-long that set up the Cowboys for a game-winning drive, only to get the ball right back. Once Romo decided he wanted to lose the game more, Sanchez threw a would-be pick that went right through a defender’s hands. And this all came against a secondary that was down its top three cornerbacks for part of the second half. We remember all this stuff now, but two months from now the Jets’ win will get thrown in Sanchez’s file as a comeback victory without any of the context or in-between happenings. It’s absurd. Sanchez deserves credit for the late drives he’s led (the drive against the Texans from last season comes to mind), but giving him a “win” for what he did in the fourth quarter is just a bad use of statistics and assigning credit.