Football broadcaster Romo’s live predictions have become his shtick
Last summer, when Tony Romo was still a broadcasting wannabe, when he was learning his craft by calling taped National Football League games off a collection of monitors in suburban Dallas studios, when he was still becoming comfortable with someone yakking into his ear while he was talking to a pretend audience, he began crafting a bit of shtick into his personal game plan.
Romo, to the chagrin of his broadcast coaches, ad-libbed by predicting upcoming plays. His success rate was remarkable.
Still, his tutors, with decades of experience in the broadcasting game, cautioned him not to share with his audience what he believed he saw coming. But if he absolutely, positively couldn’t contain himself, they prescribed he limit such leaps of fate to a bare minimum. Failure would not be an acceptable option when the real CBS lights came on with him sitting in the network’s lead NFL booth alongside play-by-play partner Jim Nantz.
Since Romo was calling games that already had been played, there was a smidge of suspicion that he might have had, you know, some sort of advantage — sneak advance peaks. “Familiarity,” would be a polite explanation for what some suspected.
But it wasn’t so, leaving Romo to file his tutors’ instructions into a recess of his memory bank under “suggestions” and continue on his merry prognosticating way.
Now after his 14th game in a real, live NFL booth, bona fide live predictions for what viewers might see coming has become Romo’s calling card, his signature shtick. They are becoming like John Madden “booms”; Chris Berman nicknames; Al Michaels sly references to betting lines; and Nantz’s “Hello, friends.”
Romo, however, still may be walking a tight rope. What happens if his predictive power slumps? Sure Nantz calls attention to the many times Romo is right but he moves on quickly when his partner occasionally is wrong. The attention Romo has gotten for his predictions has been “overblown,” said Jim Rikhoff, an early coach last summer who is also the CBS producer of NFL games charged with working with Romo and Nantz.
It’s not that CBS’s lead NFL producer doesn’t appreciate the on-target predictions his analyst has brought to he booth. It’s just that Rikhoff fears it tends to overshadow the rest of Romo’s thus far remarkable rookie season.
“Tony Romo has been such a quick study,” Rikhoff said. “He gets it.”
Dallas’s Tony Martinez is the broadcast coach whom CBS hired to complement the Connecticutbased Rikhoff with the novice Romo. Martinez was brought on board not long after Romo was introduced as the network’s lead NFL analyst back in April. Romo’s was a stunning hire, to say the least. No one in memory has walked into a two-man lead booth.
Once a sports reporter/anchor at WFAA, Martinez said he was hired to help mould Romo. He warned the former Cowboys quarterback early in their tutorial sessions to be very careful with play prediction.
“It can become a game behind the game for the viewers,” Martinez said. “It takes attention away from the game itself. That should never happen. And besides you can’t always be right . ... But he’s so intuitive. He’s making it work.”
Maybe it’s because Romo, who retired after the 2016 season, is so fresh off the field that it remains second nature.
Maybe it’s because his football IQ is so off the charts that he always will see things before they happen. Or maybe it’s because he brings a boyish impishness to work that will always challenge conventional wisdom.
Now Romo, 14 seasons a Cowboys quarterback, worked his first game featuring his former team. You might surmise, as his successor Dak Prescott has, Romo would be able to correctly predict plays ad nauseam.
“Hopefully he doesn’t call out and guess too many of our plays,” Prescott said last week. “He’ll still be very familiar with them. Hopefully he can stay away from that this week.”
Over the summer, Martinez dredged up a tape of the Cowboys’ debut on Monday Night Football during the show’s inaugural 1970 season. One of the analysts in the booth that ninth week of the season was rookie Don Meredith, also a former Cowboys quarterback.
The Cowboys, with Craig Morton and Roger Staubach playing quarterback, were humiliated that night by the St. Louis Cardinals, 38-0, inside the Cotton Bowl.
Meredith, Martinez said, didn’t take it well.
“It was like Meredith was still a Cowboys employee,” Martinez said. “He was such a homer for the Cowboys. Today, he would be laughed off the air.”
Yesteryear, of course, before the era of execution by social media, Meredith was given a reprieve, allowing him to go on to a legendary career in the Monday Night Football booth.
The lesson for the day: “You always have to remain a professional,” Martinez told Romo. “You have to forget your biases.”
Romo, 37, replaced Phil Simms, 62, who worked alongside Nantz for 13 seasons.
CBS believes Romo still is in finishing school. Keep in mind that CBS Sports boss Sean McManus’s mantra all season has been that Romo “is a work in progress” who does not need to be disturbed.
Last season, Rikhoff worked with CBS’s third team — Greg Gumbel and Trent Green.
To say that Rikhoff has been pleased with Romo’s work and progress would be an understatement.
But he said he has been only “mildly surprised” by Romo’s staggering success to date because “we all saw the potential from the start.”
Rikhoff, who was on the phone talking business with Romo when first contacted for this story, said he believes those who criticized hiring a rookie broadcaster and throwing him into the No. 1 booth missed a crucial point.
“He brings a really fresh view to the broadcast,” Rikhoff said. “I’ve been in meetings with him and coaches and players all season. He knows the coaches. He played against the players. They all know him, too. They all relate to him. They tell him things. They respect him.”
That’s been a secret sauce in Romo’s recipe for success.