Tony Romo and the rare joy of hearing actual expertise
The Super Bowl happened and, with it, so many questions big and small. Is Tom Brady part cyborg and maybe even immortal? Did the Los Angeles Rams figure out that they got that far by the grace of several sleepwalking referees?
How frequently will Tony Romo see the future? And might our fascination with that speak to a longing that reaches far beyond football?
But first a quick primer on Romo, CBS’s dependably psychic commentator. Over the course of two seasons analyzing National Football League games from the broadcast booth, he has provided more than the usual blather and banter. He guesses what will happen next: blitz or no blitz, run or pass, involving this wide receiver or that tight end. He doesn’t do this for every play, but he does it repeatedly. And if he were picking stocks on Wall Street, he’d be a gazillionaire.
Romo, 38, spent more than a decade as a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. He was great but he wasn’t great, and with him as its leader, the team never went all the way. In a twist that’s testament to second acts in American lives, he’s doing something as a star for CBS that he never did as a star for the Cowboys: going to the Super Bowl. I suppose that’s fitting, because he’s more than great in his current gig. He’s peerless. And he’s a sensation.
So much so that after the Patriots-Chiefs game, reporters for The Wall Street Journal studied 46 hours of television footage from this past football season and found 72 instances when Romo prophesied what a team was about to do. The team did what he said 68 percent of the time.
“A broadcasting phenomenon” is how
The Journal describes Romo. Twitter calls him Romostradamus. Football fans gush about Romomania.
This is about the rarity of his unquestionably deep knowledge in an era when so many of the people who put on the trappings of authority and peddle pearls of wisdom don’t actually have the goods. When so many opinions come with a swagger inversely proportional to their worth. When social media, cable channels, webcasts, podcasts, blogs and more have created an environment in which everybody’s an expert and nobody’s an expert — in which it’s sometimes impossible to tell. With Romo you can tell. As I’ve savored his genius and reflected on its appeal, I’ve flashed back to comments President Obama made to The New Yorker in late November 2016. Obama was obsessed with the chaotic nature of this new information ecosystem. “Everything is true and nothing is true,” he told Remnick. “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.”
“The volume of data is exploding, and yet credible information is harder to find,” Amy Zegart wrote in The Atlantic. “Why? Because the barriers to entry are so low.” You just need an internet connection.Romo’s habitat — network television — is old-fashioned, but his seriousness sets him apart. He played recently, so he understands what the athletes are thinking, what the coaches are plotting, what makes sense on third down. He uses the days between the games that he’s announcing to bone up on the teams that will come under his gaze. While he comes by his charisma naturally, he makes it a point to be informed.