When Tony Romo burst onto the scene as a sports broadcaster, he was hailed as the next great color commentator. Romo, who began his sportscasting career alongside Jim Nantz in 2017, began with a hot streak as he called games with uncanny foresight and was dubbed “Romostradamus”.
He was successfully predicting plays before they were happening while calling out defensive formations and bringing energy and enthusiasm the CBS booth lacked under Phil Simms, Romo’s predecessor.
Romo’s rapid rise landed him a monster contract with CBS for 10 years and $180 million. However, Romo’s broadcaster career has progressively gotten worse since his first couple of years on the job.
After what many perceive to be a lackluster performance in the AFC Championship Game between the Chiefs and Bengals, Andrew Marchand of The New York Post reported that CBS executives attempted an “intervention” with Romo before the season.
“Tony Romo needs to study more,” Marchand said during The Marchand and Ourand Sports Media Podcast. “He needs to be better prepared. As you move away from the sidelines, you need to do more work. I know CBS is aware of this. They tried an intervention last offseason. They knew, they anticipated this. That’s a credit to them, the people in charge there. But it has not gotten better.”
The lesson of Tony Romo can also be applied to any talk show host. Just when you start to get comfortable, don’t. Keep challenging yourself. Keep challenging your audience.
If you read between the lines of the Marchand report, Tony Romo has gotten lazy. He stopped preparing. And as they wisely note, it becomes harder to be “Romostradamus” the farther away you get from the game, meaning your preparation needs to be even greater.
In our line of work, there are hosts in markets who know their audience is there every day, no matter how interesting they are, or aren’t. They can get away without paying attention to a single PPM principle and still pull impressive ratings. They’re the lucky ones, depending on how you look at it, where the show, or the station brand, is enough to carry them.
But, then some haven’t quite fared as well. The game has passed them. They don’t want to put in the work and that’s starting to show in the on-air product.
Complacency can be human nature, but doing what talk show hosts do every day doesn’t allow for it. Your job is to entertain in quarter-hour clips, regardless, for hours every day. Everyone has days where shows feel like a grind, but the audience should not be able to decipher that.
If they can tell you’re mailing it in, not prepared and, as a result, less entertaining, you’ve let them down. And unlike Tony Romo, who people will sit through listening to to watch an NFL game, they aren’t doing that for you. They’re looking for entertaining audio content and they’ve got dozens of options, other than you, to choose from at that moment.
So while Tony Romo has let down NFL fans for the better part of the last two seasons with his sub-par, over-caffeinated, oftentimes incoherent analysis, he can likely get away with it, for at least a little while longer.
You can’t. Because, unlike Tony Romo, if they use the “mute” button on you, it’s game over.
Pete Mundo is a weekly columnist for Barrett Media, and the morning show host and program director for KCMO in Kansas City. Previously, he was a fill-in host nationally on FOX News Radio and CBS Sports Radio, while anchoring for WFAN, WCBS News Radio 880, and Bloomberg Radio. Pete was also the sports and news director for Omni Media Group at K-1O1/Z-92 in Woodward, Oklahoma. He’s also the owner of the Big 12-focused digital media outlet Heartland College Sports. To interact, find him on Twitter @PeteMundo.
