Colin Cowherd has never been the biggest fan of Tony Romo the broadcaster, and he’s not sure whether CBS has been either.
Cowherd joined Ethan Strauss on his House of Strauss podcast Friday, where the FS1 host discussed Romo’s now unclear future with CBS. In the wake of being arrested on suspicion of operating while intoxicated last week in Milwaukee, CBS placed Romo on leave “until further notice” Friday morning. With no timetable for his return, Romo will be replaced by J.J Watt in their lead NFL booth alongside Jim Nantz and Tracy Wolfson. But Cowherd wonders if Romo’s relationship with CBS started to break when they signed him to a 10-year $180 million contract back in 2020.
“When you go into contract negotiations, there was a moment in time that Tony Romo had tremendous leverage over CBS,” Cowherd noted. “And he squeezed them for every nickel.”
Romo was an immediate star on CBS when he joined in 2017. And when his first contract was up, ESPN pursued Romo for their Monday Night Football booth, giving the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback all the leverage he needed to command an industry-altering contract from CBS.
“Even if you have leverage, it will create resentment somewhere upstairs,” Cowherd insisted. “And I’ve always thought with the CBS execs, they don’t defend him quite as quickly. Or, when this recent story came out, reportedly, for the first two days nobody from CBS contacted him. That’s what I heard from somebody who would know. And I thought, is there resentment upstairs? Because he had them. He had them dead to rights, and he got every penny he wanted.”
Tom Brady now makes significantly more from Fox than Romo does at CBS. The difference, however, is Brady wasn’t fielding offers from other networks; he didn’t have his sights set on broadcasting until Fox came calling. Fox had to lure Brady with money and opportunity, and they set the price. CBS probably never expected Romo to end up costing them $180 million until he started a bidding war.
Brady’s number also doesn’t automatically give Kevin Burkhardt leverage. Because as great as Burkhardt is as a play-by-play voice, Brady is the indisputable star of that booth. That’s not the case with Romo, where Nantz is the more important entity to CBS. So if Romo squeezes CBS for every nickel and gets a massive pay bump, it gives Nantz leverage to do the same.
“It made executives uncomfortable,” Cowherd told Strauss. “There was a lot of questions, they had to take calls. There’s a very well-documented trip by Sean McManus down to Dallas to talk to Romo…I find the Tony Romo dynamic with CBS fascinating.”
It was within Romo’s rights to get every dollar he could from CBS. He didn’t owe them any sort of hometown discount when ESPN came calling with an open checkbook. But that doesn’t mean CBS walked away from the negotiations feeling great about their relationship with Romo.
Early in his broadcasting career, Romo was arguably the best game analyst on TV. But his appeal faded significantly in recent years, with fans eager to point out every mistake, exaggeration, and weird noise he makes in the booth. As Cowherd noted, even past leadership at CBS once held what was described as an “intervention” with Romo in 2023 to encourage better preparation habits.
Publicly, CBS stood by Romo amid mounting criticism in recent years, although the contract he leveraged likely played a role. It would have been hard for the network to admit a $180 million mistake by demoting Romo. But CBS may have gotten its leverage back in the last week.
