Call Terry Bradshaw. Break down game film. Go for a jog. Harness your inner chi. Twiddle your thumbs. These are all constructive activities for an NFL quarterback in the week before his second career playoff start. Spending a weekend lounging on a Mexican beach with Jessica Simpson, however, is probably not the surest recipe for postseason success. Yet there was Tony Romo, gallivanting south of the border, cool as a cucumber beside his napalm strike-in-the-Mojave Desert-hot girlfriend. aybe the media is making too much out of Romo’s weekend getaway. But after the man literally let last season’s playoff game against Seattle slip through his fingers and closed out 2007 by throwing five interceptions and one touchdown over the final three games, you have to wonder. His franchise has not won a postseason game in over a decade. He has a sore thumb. And he decided to spend his time idling poolside at a resort in Cabo. “I learned a while ago that stuff doesn’t matter,” Romo told New York Times earlier in the week. “I just live my life. I try and work hard at football. I try to do things the right way.” Romo claims he watched his upcoming opponent, the New York Giants, beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on television in the first round of the playoffs last Sunday. But I wonder just how diligently he can dissect the Giants’ Cover Two with Simpson whispering sweet nothings in one ear and a pool-bar waiter named Juan asking, “¿Quiere usted otra margarita?” in the other. You never saw Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin taking off for pre-game vacations in the days of the early 1990s Dallas dynasty. Irvin had more fun with cocaine and prostitutes than Nikki Sixx, but he always waited courteously until after the Cowboys won the Super Bowl. Tom Brady does cologne ads and has been romantically linked to pages 1 to 117 of the December issue of Glamour, but he doesn’t fool around when it comes to game preparation. Earlier this season, following the Patriots’ 49-28 waxing of the Miami Dolphins on Oct. 21, a reporter asked Brady if he liked the hometown Red Sox’s chances in the World Series. “I’ll be in bed by about nine o’clock,” Brady said. “So you all can tell me how they did tomorrow.” At the time, the Pats were only seven games into their record-breaking perfect season, but you can bet Brady’s routine remains the same today. Brady spent his team’s bye weekend playing patty cake with his baby boy in New York, then returned to Foxboro for another week of early-to-bed nights and up-at-dawn film sessions in the Pats’ training facility. Peyton Manning doesn’t leave the house, much less the country, before games. After New York’s 24-14 first-round win in Tampa, Giants quarterback Eli Manning headed back to East Rutherford, N.J. – quite possibly the furthest place on the map from sunny Cabo – to prepare for Romo and the Cowboys. Romo may be head-over-heels for Simpson, and she may be the cure to all that ails him, but he shouldn’t jeopardize his career by creating this kind of controversy. Simpson has already played Yoko Ono to the Cowboys’ Beatles once this year. The moment she showed up in a Texas Stadium luxury box wearing a pink Romo jersey on Dec. 16, Romo looked like McLovin in shoulder pads. Since then, Terrell Owens voiced his concerns over his quarterback’s witchy woman, and Simpson has elected to skip Sunday’s game. If Dallas wins, none of this will matter. But if the Giants pull off an upset, every pigskin pundit and talking head on ESPN will be comparing Manning’s lunch pail to Romo’s umbrella drink. A Cowboys collapse would be the team’s second straight painful postseason disappointment, and the blame will fall squarely on Romo’s shoulders. The ever-unstable Owens will turn on Romo, and Jessica will bolt the second the silver star on Romo’s helmet begins to tarnish. (If Romo thinks that he got Simpson because he has a good sense of humor, he’s about to be blindsided by something a lot worse than anything an unblocked Michael Strahan could do to him.) ost guys would give up everything to spend a weekend in Mexico with Jessica Simpson. If the Cowboys lose Sunday, Romo will have. Harlan Goode is a senior in the College. He can be reached at goodethehoya.com. The Goode Worde appears every Friday in HOYA SPORTS.