WITH 120 MILLION WATCHING, SHOULD THE WORLD HEAR TONY ROMO’S VOICE?

Considered a state-of-the-art analyst years ago, he has gone stale and needs to produce landmark Super Bowl commentary this Sunday night, or CBS might be chasing Fox's Greg Olsen to replace him

     What should we tell a football analyst who makes $18 million a year and no longer cares? Unlike his playing career, when Tony Romo couldn’t lead the Dallas Cowboys past the NFC divisional round, he was branded a generational commentator when his CBS superiors gave him $180 million not far into retirement. Initially, he was brilliant in grasping formations, plays and boomerangs before they were called.

     Then they gave him the largest contract ever in sports media. And here we are, at a Super Bowl in Las Vegas that will draw the highest broadcast ratings in American history, wondering why he babbles about what … exactly? That’s my only explanation for Romo, that he stopped trying to be great and thought he could mumble jumbles into a microphone. Once known for predicting outcomes, as a Romostradamus, who remembers the last time he helped the audience?

     When Baltimore defensive tackle Travis Jones was sidelined with an eye injury, Romo said, “Right there, his right ankle gets twisted.”

     When Zay Flowers fumbles away the AFC championship game for the Ravens, Romo said, “I mean, that’s the game, but it’s not over.”

     When Kansas City’s Mecole Hardman clearly fumbles out of bounds, Romo said, “I mean, I could’ve seen ’em going either way because the call on the field was that he was down. And I think it’s the right call, but I could have easily seen …”

     When Pittsburgh used a potent backfield of Najee Harris and Jaylen Warren, which every fantasy player knew, he said, “I didn’t realize they had this 1-2 punch.”

     When he noticed partner Jim Nantz standing in the booth, he said, “It’s not sexy like you, Jim.”

     When he covered a Bears-Packers game, he referred to Chicago coordinator Luke Getsy as “Gets-ky” and referred to left tackle Braxton Jones as Brendan Jones.

     When he kept claiming each week that Taylor Swift had married Travis Kelce, he finally said, “It’s a joke. Someone did that to me back in the day. People come up to me all the time (asking), ‘What do you know?’ People love it and go crazy for it. It’s Taylor. She’s just as big a personality as anybody in the world right now. I think it’s a great thing she’s at football games. I think it just adds value, and I think our team does it the right way. … It just comes out organically.”

     If not truthfully. “In games like this, the ball matters more than any other game,” he said when Lamar Jackson fumbled in the title clash. And when the Bills coughed up the ball, Romo referred to the 1972 “Immaculate Reception” when Franco Harris converted a game-clinching score. When Dolly Parton dressed up for Thanksgiving Day in Dallas, he said, “She was wearing the Cowboys’ cheerleading outfit. You saw that coming, didn’t you? You said, ‘I think she’s going to go with a little cheerleading outfit tonight.’ I was like, wow, that’s pretty good. I mean, she looks amazing, right? She’s wonderful. Who doesn’t like Dolly Parton?”

     This is the beginning of the end of Romo, with years remaining on his deal only months after CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus and game producer Jim Rikhoff met with him and made suggestions. They didn’t plan on another bad Romo season when 120 million people will watch this weekend, judging the network on its biggest payday ever. More Romo crackups? There will be demands to replace him with Greg Olsen, who will be available from the Fox Sports team when Tom Brady replaces him next season. Just as Romo was considered a game-changer in 2018, when he and Nantz dominated the AFC championship game, Olsen employs metrics that make him the hit of soclal media whirls. By comparison, Romo is a doofus on a barstool. If Bill Belichick extends his vocal cords to TV, NBC’s MIke Tirico is the first to say he won’t attract bad vibes on the Internet, Romo’s fatal problem.

     “If he does TV for a year or more, he’ll be awesome,” Tirico said. “He’ll be the guy that everybody shuts up and listens to. I promise you.”

     In Romo’s world, he thinks he’s better than ever. Just as he was early on, when he said, “Jim, I’ve got five dollars this is a run to the left.” Tennessee’s Derrick Henry ran to the left. Nantz asked what Romo saw.

     “I’ve seen football in the NFL for 14 years,” he said.

     Why can’t he return to that element? Because he hasn’t played a game in eight years. The schemes, the head coaches, the coordinators, the quarterbacks — the NFL has master-blasted. Romo doesn’t seem to understand when asked about his general decline.

     “It’s a normal arc of someone’s career when you do something at a very high level. I think that’s normal,” he said. “Same thing happens in football. You become dominant at things and then all of a sudden people are like, ‘OK.’ Honestly, I think a lot of people were rooting against (Patrick) Mahomes because he’s been there. They want to see people new. At the end, Tiger Woods comes back and everyone roots for you. It’s not abnormal. It’s absolutely what’s supposed to happen.”

     Not if you lose your elite game and aren’t worth $18 million per for 10 years. Romo doesn’t care about social media when his bosses clearly watch the fallout. “If you liked our broadcast, and you said, ‘Wow, I love Jim Nantz and Tony Romo,’ and you said that on there on your tweet, are you going to keep doing that every week, or would that make you look a little silly?” he said. “I think there’s far more people who I see every single day who come up and love our broadcast and our team and CBS and what we do, and I hear that and feel that. And you can feel it in life. There’s so many people that have said they love us."

     To his face, maybe. Online? “And so you’re going to have the negative aspects that come in from time to time, but those things are normal. That’s what’s supposed to happen through the arc,” Romo said. “I’m telling you, there a lot of people who … if I went on there and sent a tweet out of ‘Hey, do you guys still like us?’ — I think you’d hear about it all over again.”

     Then why doesn’t he?

     Nantz’s performance also has waned. In the overall commentary, it’s clear Fox’s team of Olsen and Kevin Burkhardt, ESPN’s team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman and NBC’s team of Tirico and Cris Collinsworth are clobbering CBS. It makes you wonder why ESPN pushed the Romo money meter by chasing him, forcing CBS to give him megadollars. Interesting, isn’t it, that McManus retires this April? In a soft interview via the Athletic, Nantz was asked about the broadcast crew lately.

     “It’s not good, fallen off a cliff!” he said, laughing.

     Why even allude to perceptions if they have no validity?

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.