To fans of the Dallas Cowboys, Tony Romo is already a shining star. He is the face of the franchise and our hope for a return to glory for the team. However, our views and opinions are biased because of our love and passion for the Cowboys.

In the football mainstream, Romo is nothing more than just one of hundreds of players oozing with potential, but never realizing that potential. Mention Romo’s name and you usually get responses like “he’s a choker”, or “he’s never won in a game that mattered”, or “he doesn’t know how to lead”.

“What exactly has he accomplished?” they will say.

And they’ll be sure to remind you that the only thing that matters in the NFL is going to the post season.

On Friday, Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones sounded like someone who understood the hits on Romo, but also believes that the Cowboys have paved the way for Romo to take that next step and erase all the negativity that has been levied at him.

“It’s hard to take over leadership when you’ve got a strong personality like Terrell,” Stephen Jones said. “If you look back at our old teams [from the 1990s], a lot of people would say maybe Michael Irvin was the leader.

“Then you might say, ‘He was a receiver. What about Troy Aikman? He was the quarterback. Wasn’t he the leader?’ And the answer is, yeah, Troy was a leader. But if Michael wasn’t supportive of him, Troy would’ve had problems.

“A lot of our players thought the world of Terrell — they still do. They loved the way he prepared and how hard he played, and everybody respected his skills and what he’d done in the league. And with him here, I think he was always going to carry that kind of weight.”

Jones is right. What we needed most from T.O. was for him to be supportive and he failed miserably in that department. But this post isn’t about T.O. or about ancient history.

This post is about the future of this team and the new course that has been chartered. Our goal remains the same and that is to secure another Super Bowl for this franchise.  There are several roads a team can take to a championship, but lets face it somewhere along that journey the Cowboys had lost their way.

It’s hard for others to follow when they have lost sight of their leader. In Tony Romo, the Cowboys have always had a potentially great leader, but his hands were bound and he was forced to operate in the shadows of another dominating and intimidating presence. It kept Romo from advancing, and the rest of the team stagnated with him.

A new season will soon be upon us and with it comes a new sense of excitement.  Romo has always had an enormous amount of talent, but for the first time since taking over as the Cowboys’ starting quarterback, we may finally get to see Tony Romo unleashed and unbound.

All of that tremendous talent and all of that unrealized potential has been building up over the last 2 1/2 seasons and now it is ready to explode and send shock waves to all the non-believers that have doubted him.

There are no more excuses… There are no more distractions…

Tony Romo may have been the unquestioned leader in name only before, but now that role finally has some real meaning to it. With Romo at the helm, the rest of the team can now follow someone whose destination is clearly fixed on winning another championship for Dallas.

The Cowboys are no longer just a mighty battleship lost at sea.

We have embarked upon a new course, and we finally have someone who can stand tall and lead the charge.