Wade Phillips press conference 10/16/08

Summary of the Wade Phillips' press conference today.

Keith Davis, Tank Johnson and Tony Romo were limited in practice today. Full practice for Pat Watkins and Roy Williams, and the other Roy Williams practiced, too.

Tony Romo threw some in warm-ups, he threw all right, Brad Johnson took most of the snaps, but Romo took some with the first-team offense, he threw pretty well. Playing QB isn't just throwing the ball, other things are involved, but I'm not counting him out. Brad did take most of the snaps. Other factors play into it, we'll see over the few days.

(Answers to a string of Romo questions)

He was limited, he took only a few snaps under center. There's things to worry about, some of it is executing running plays, securing the football and the injury itself. Looking at everything, whether the player says they want to play or not, we're considering everything. We'll look at it again tomorrow. We could wait to gameday to make a decision. He did throw and threw pretty accurately but only limited. He has a splint they made for him that he felt comfortable with, they added some things to it for protection, it's almost like a cast. He said he cut his finger once in college and had games when he played with his finger wrapped. As long as he can hold the football is one thing, but a it's concern because it's a fracture. We talked about things last night because he did throw yesterday, last night we talked about possible game plans. It depends on how much risk there is, that's part of the decision. If he broke his hand completely they would have to do surgery, it would be a longer process, not a career ending thing even if he did break it completely, but a longer time to heal. That's what we're determining, how much risk. We're discussing it with Tony, there's a lot involved and to analyze and decide. We'll know more as we go tomorrow, probably after practice and still looking at tape of his throws, he threw some good passes. He didn't do any handoffs today. He was in on Tuesday night of this week getting in the game plan. When they put the splint together and he could grip the ball he was excited about that. We once played against Terry Bradshaw when I was with the Oilers, he broke his hand, then we knocked out the second QB, Tony Dungy came in and finished the game. We killed him, no disrespect to Tony. Bradshaw came back two weeks later with huge cast on his hand and threw the ball and they beat us.

Roy Williams (RW2) looked good in practice today. He knows the offense pretty well, the terminology he's familiar with. We need to get that mojo working for us, that Odessa Permian mojo. I don't know about him starting, be he will play and we'll try to get him the football some.

Bobby Carpenter is our backup for Burnett, he'll take the reps not Zach or Bradie.

Jenkins was tired after practice we threw at him a lot, he's not the only one, he and Scandrick worked on all the teams including scout. It's good for them to work against our offense, we have good receivers. They competed real well, they competing against our players and getting confidence.

Keith Davis has stitches in his thumb. He practiced for most of practice. They'll have to take the stitches out before the game.

Special teams I hope will be improved. It better be. We're working hard at it. That's the way you approach it. Players are into it, focused, they want to do better. A lot of it is technique, work on technique like getting off blocks, protecting the punter, which steps to use, how to use your hands, how to put one hand on a guy going downfield and shove him. For kickoff coverage we go over all their (Rams) kickoff returns and how to attack them.