CBS should consider a Tony Romo demotion after playoff disasterclass

NFL: JAN 19 AFC Championship - Titans at Chiefs
NFL: JAN 19 AFC Championship - Titans at Chiefs | Icon Sportswire/GettyImages

The NFL nearly batted .1000 on Wild Card Weekend.

Every game leading up to Sunday's dud between the Patriots and Chargers went down to the wire. In the first three games, the team that was leading at the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter ended up losing. The football did, in fact, football, and Bills vs. Jaguars was no exception.

Unfortunately, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo was on the call for CBS, and he actively made the viewing experience worse as Josh Allen and Trevor Lawrence traded haymakers in the second half.

Romo's performance drew the ire of football fans, and it's led to a larger conversation about CBS potentially demoting Jim Nantz and Romo for the Divisional Round.

CBS could demote former Cowboys QB Tony Romo after playoff disasterclass

Romo burst onto the scene as the NFL’s most insightful and entertaining color analyst, and his knack for predicting plays before they happened brought a unique flavor to the broadcast. Sunday’s disaster was a sobering reminder of just how much he has regressed in the booth.

It is painfully obvious that Romo doesn’t do any real prep, which helps explain why he’s so often wrong about season-long team tendencies.

Not watching film or staying up to date with team narratives is bad enough, but he also speaks long-windedly without saying much of substance, and that blathering often bleeds into the next play during high-leverage moments. He leans heavily on generalities and clichés (see the above tweet), likely because he has no real studying to fall back on.

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While Jim Nantz has lost some of his fastball as a play-by-play announcer, he’s not “washed.” He can still paint 90 on the black. That his wagon is hitched to Tony Romo in the latter stages of a legendary career is highly unfortunate.

Nantz alone may be enough to save Romo from a demotion, but it won’t stop the growing groundswell calling for CBS to elevate its B-team of Ian Eagle and J.J. Watt, who has exceeded every expectation in his first year in the booth.

NBC has the Super Bowl this year, so Jim Nantz and Tony Romo will only call two more games. CBS could choose to bite the bullet and reevaluate the duo in the offseason, but a large portion of football fans would erupt in celebration if the network announced a change of plans for the rest of the playoffs.

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