Tony Romo says nearly a decade away from NFL hasn’t required much adjustment: ‘The game is not rocket science’

It’s been a rough few years to be Tony Romo, and the last several months haven’t done much to reverse the tide.

The former Dallas Cowboys quarterback arrived at CBS in 2017 as a genuine revelation, predicting plays before they happened, injecting a jolt of life into a booth that had grown stale under Phil Simms, while making watching football feel like hanging out with the smartest guy in your fantasy league. The network rewarded him with a 10-year, $180 million deal in 2020, making him the highest-paid analyst in television history. In the years since, the play predictions have dried up, the analysis has grown shallower, the criticism has become impossible to ignore, and the musings that he has stopped doing the film study that once defined his preparation have become increasingly difficult to dismiss.

Romo himself has admitted the criticism is “warranted” in the past, though during a recent appearance on Pardon My Take, he was asked whether he pays attention to any of it.

“You’re live on air for three, three and a half hours every week,” he said. “It’s like you’re probably going to do something right. I mean, we do more right than wrong; otherwise, you wouldn’t be in the position you’re in. But I think, like anything, you’re going to do something wrong. I just always want — in the back of your brain you’re literally thinking about you guys watching at home, and it’s like, what would I want?”

It’s a fair point as far as it goes. Calling live football for three hours every Sunday is really hard, and no analyst goes mistake-free. But the criticism leveled at Romo in recent years isn’t about occasional miscues as much as it’s about a sustained, visible decline in the quality and depth of his analysis, which has made his good moments harder to find.

“Sometimes they don’t talk about something, and I’m like, ‘Tell me. Tell me about that thing. Was that a catch? Was that not? Was he in bounds? What do you think?’ And then deeper than that, it goes to I want to teach, and I think that’s one of the biggest things is I want people to understand why, because there’s so much of that that goes into it,” he continued.

That instinct — to explain the decision-making behind what viewers are watching rather than just describe the action — was what made Romo revelatory when he first arrived in the booth. The deeper issue, as Awful Announcing wrote last fall, is whether that instinct is still being backed up by the preparation required to execute it on a weekly basis.

“Why did they make that decision? Why did they run the ball on fourth-and-2? Well, because of the numbers in the box and blah, blah, blah, or because of this,” Romo said. “I just feel like that’s what people want. And the more people I talk to, they love it and everything. It’s been a rewarding experience.”

The PMT hosts also asked how Romo has had to adjust to being out of the league for nearly a decade and what that process looks like from the booth. Romo said the foundation he built over a lifetime in football makes that adjustment more manageable than it might appear from the outside, and that the fundamentals don’t change enough to render nine years of distance from the field disqualifying.

“Once you’ve done it your whole life and studied it the way I have, I don’t think you’re going to see anything new,” he said. “The game is not rocket science. There’s not like a bunch of new brand-new stuff coming out.”

There’s some irony in Romo delivering these answers to the same two guys who spent January calling him out after he called Josh Allen “Mahomes” during the Bills-Broncos divisional round game, with Dan “Big Cat” Katz saying it felt like watching someone having a stroke and Eric “PFT Commenter” Sollenberger declaring that Romo “does not give a f*ck anymore,” while also conceding that he “did make up for a little” with some good insight later in the broadcast.

But that’s the paradox of Tony Romo in 2026, even as he insists the years away from the NFL haven’t diminished his ability to explain it.