Tony Romo’s Fall Is a Reminder That the TV Booth Is No Longer a Refuge

Traina mailbag: Questions surround Tony Romo after he was placed on leave

Gone are the days when football broadcasting was an extension of Prom King voting. One had to be memorably athletic, mostly inoffensive and in possession of enough hair to necessitate high-end product.

Tony Romo’s arrest for driving under the influence, which CBS announced today will trigger a leave of absence for the network’s top NFL game analyst, was certainly abhorrent, especially to the more than 11,000 people whose lives are irreversibly affected by drunk driving accidents every year. But in the realm of the country club-to-booth analyst, who roamed the landscape freely from the 1970s to the early 2000s, easily juggling an early morning tee time, a handful of gin and tonics and the most meaningless platitudes about toughness and determination you’ve ever heard, this kind of behavior would not have prompted the same reaction in 1989 or 1999 as it did now. Romo has, for the past three years, been the unfortunate changing face of what is expected out of a top color analyst on a professional football broadcast. He was paid like a franchise quarterback and is now, for all intents and purposes, being benched like one.

Sean Payton makes a lot of wild points, but one I happened to agree with was the idea that fantasy football has generally improved the world of professional football. Like the evolution of broadcasters, we are no longer expected to arrive at draft night with a pocket full of unresearched hunches. If we are not rehearsed and even slightly misjudge the ADP range of Colston Loveland, everyone else in the room will smell blood in the water.

That has led to us expecting more from the gatekeepers of information and access. Even Cris Collinsworth, whom I would place firmly in the former crowd—a charismatic if slightly inappropriate uncle type—was on the ground floor of Pro Football Focus. By attaching himself to a suite of tools that helped reshape the NFL as we know it, Collinsworth managed to stay relevant at the top of a competitive food chain.

Romo placed a target on his back long before he was pulled over on a Wisconsin highway. His magic trick—predicting plays—started to wear thin and was very likely redlined by the gambling companies that pour billions of dollars into the NFL product. These companies make money by asking people to wager on whether the next play is a run or a pass. Beyond this, Romo failed to do what Tom Brady did during his sophomore season with Fox and develop a second pitch. Maybe Romo thought it was his exuberance and the kind of 50-year-old-dad-has-a-late-in-life-kid energy that he and Jim Nantz can sometimes pleasantly conjure together. However, those notes are most frequently out of tune.

We say all of that not to criticize Romo but to paint a picture of how complicated it is to succeed now as a former player in the booth. Greg Olsen, I’d bet, has a more nuanced understanding of in-game decision-making and the different analytical schools of thought for every call than he did as a player. J.J. Watt, who will be replacing Romo, is not one of the greatest pass rushers who ever lived. However, he is, as partner Ian Eagle has noted, a standout for the volume of questions he asks and the every-moment evidence of his humility that he provides. He is, to complete the analogy, the Prom King if the Prom King also happened to win Friendliest, Smartest, Best Dressed, Most Likely to Succeed and Still Cool Enough to Rip the NFL for NFLPA Report Cards Despite Being Paid by a League Partner award.

I don’t want to tie the perceived diminishing of Romo’s performance to an arrest for driving under the influence, and I don’t believe anyone should. I also don’t support those who wanted Romo away from their broadcast of choice cheering on a person who is, at the very least, suffering from poor decision-making skills. What I do hope former players understand is that the booth is no longer a refuge for post-career income and status. It is as large and as fragile a glass house as the one they lived in during their playing careers. It is not something that you do after football to stay tangentially attached to the sport. It is its own maniacally competitive machine that, like any other form of entertainment, is subject to the wild teenage-style vacillations in our preferences, wants and needs.

Beyond the Prom King, we are now in search of less an analyst than the wishlist of a perpetually unmarried person whose standards rise with the viewing of every plastic Hallmark husband that enters their database. Romo was hired at a time when this was not the case and was the first high-profile analyst forced to swim into deeper waters. His fall is a reminder of how quickly that transition happened, and that those vying to replace him must understand the new parameters before applying.

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