One thing cannot be argued. Romo changed fans' sports vocabulary.
Football. Baseball. Basketball. You name it. Back in the day (less than a decade ago), a coach or manager would evaluate a player during a game or practice. If they did not like what they saw, they would sit the player outside the field or court in favor of another player. Throughout team sports (over a century ago), the circumstance became popularly known as benching since the replaced player would take a seat on his... um.... team's bench.
Of course, that long commonly held definition did not fit with what happened to Romo. He was injured during a preseason game. Afterwards, his head coach and owner quickly grew to prefer his successor's level of play and permanently blocked his re-insertion into the starting lineup. Some fans altered the previous meaning of the term benching to fit what happened to Romo and the rest is history.
That's Romo for you. Some folks said he would end up paralyzed and he was never paralyzed. Said people would soon forget him, he got a job at CBS and people continued talking about him. And he changed how they and the folks before them and the folks before them and the folks before them, yada yada yada, used to describe something.
Tony Romo. Like or dislike him. That guy is influential.
