In a tremendous act of metaphor, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo collapsed in the shower after the Cowboys lost 44-6 to Philadelphia in a game that put the winner into the playoffs.

Do or die? Didn't, and dead.

My friend Kelly has a theory about Tony Romo. Since Kelly is a hilarious guy who refuses to get a blog, I'll hereby steal it for myself. Romo is the modern day Patrick Ewing. He posts great numbers in the regular season, but vanishes in the playoffs.

The bigger the game, the smaller the performance. In Romo's first playoff game, he fumbled a field goal snap that would have won the game. In his second, he led the #1 seed to a loss to a wild card team. This time in an elimination game, he took a embarrassing beating of prison-roommate proportions. The way things are progressing, he might start his next playoff game by killing a peanut vendor with an errant throw.

The loss leaves the Cowboys in a bad situation. Two days after Jerry Jones emphatically said that Wade Phillips would be back next season, Wade is now the least popular man in Dallas history not to be killed by Jack Ruby.

After I had to sit through every single moment of the debacle, I came up with a few tips for the Cowboys to not make the next loss quite so crushing.

To begin with, no more hats. Tony Romo just lost the latest edition of the biggest game of his life, and he shows up for the interview looking like he just won the 1937 US Open. You're an NFL quarterback, not a British newspaper delivery boy in a Broadway musical.

Speaking of the offense, someone needs to sit down with Roy Williams and make sure he's not still using his Detroit Lions playbook. A week after complaining about not getting the ball, he wasn't even close on one of Romo's interceptions and dropped another ball that hit him square in the hands. The Cowboys gave up three draft picks for Williams, and he responds by catching a whopping two balls for four yards.

Let's put that in perspective. Turn around right now and notice where the nearest person is to you in the office.

That's it, folks. That's four yards, the sum total of Roy Williams statistics. Kenny Stabler used to gain more ground than that on a fumble.

If you're going to keep him, give Wade Phillips a headset. Even if it's not plugged into anything, just put something on his head. He just has that "nobody's listening to me" look about him without one. Everyone else is talking about the game, and he's the old uncle at the family reunion wandering around trying to remember the rest of his story.

And finally, at this point Pacman Jones could be replaced with a dummy (tackling, ventriloquist, or blow-up), and it would probably help. Jones pulled off the rare trifecta with less than a minute to go in the first half. He got beaten on a play, got flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct, then after Philadelphia scored he fumbled the kickoff and gave them a field goal. The best thing for all involved would have been for him to punch a stripper on the way to locker room and been suspended for the second half.