Fans Should Hope For Tony Romo-Greg Olsen Shakeup As Tom Brady Looms

Tony Romo’s biggest asset as the lead color commentator for the NFL on CBS was on full display Sunday afternoon in Baltimore. It just happened to be evident long after the game.

Romo went viral after the Chiefs’ AFC-clinching win over the Ravens, not for something he said or did inside the booth. Instead, Romo made headlines for an awkward interaction with Taylor Swift on the field.

According to Yahoo Sports’ Jori Epstein who captured the interaction, Swift told Romo he does a great job in the booth. That’s an increasingly rare opinion, and it’s a magnanimous compliment from Swift, whom Romo called Travis Kelce’s wife during a telecast earlier this season.

At this point in his broadcasting career, Romo’s biggest strength is, well, his fame. He’s no Swift or even Kelce, but the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback is a household name for football fans.

In a vacuum, the Swift flub is just a small mix-up from someone who gets paid to say a lot of words. Yet, verbal missteps are becoming the norm for Romo. The bloom is off the rose for him after captivating football fans in his first season or two at the mic.

“Now, though, not even halfway through Romo’s decade-long deal, CBS Sports executives have an issue because Romo and his partner, Jim Nantz, are manning broadcasts that lack chemistry, storytelling, much strategy and levity. It’s routinely discombobulated,” the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand wrote last week.

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The sharp, locked-in Romo is a distant memory. His on-air performance doesn’t give off the impression he spent any time — much less a good chunk of his week — preparing. For every useful bit of analysis, you get two or three non-sequiturs. The inane noises and rambling are becoming the gridiron version of nails on a chalkboard.

As others have pointed out, Romo is only part of the CBS problem.

Oh, now seems like a good time to mention CBS has the Super Bowl on Feb. 11.

The gripes with the CBS coverage are pronounced when compared to the other networks, too. That was on full display Sunday when CBS handed it off to FOX for the NFC Championship Game where Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen had the call from Santa Clara, Calif.

The Burkhardt-Olsen duo might be the best in sports right now. Olsen is a rising star. The former Carolina Panthers tight end has improved every year. His insight is top-notch; his explanation of a simple goal-line blocking scheme, for example, was informational and additive during Sunday’s broadcast. He brings the energy you’d expect from a 38-year-old, and his relatively recent experience in the league gives him insight older analysts simply don’t have.

The best compliment you could pay Olsen (and the rest of the FOX A-team, really) is that they had the Super Bowl last season, and it was a complete non-story despite its relative inexperience. If anything, Olsen got high marks for his willingness to question the game’s most controversial play.

It’s a bummer then that it looks like Olsen ultimately will be kicked out of his booth in favor of Tom Brady. It looks like the greatest of all time will finally start his 10-year, $375 million deal with FOX in 2024, and you don’t give a dude $37.5 million per year to put him on the B team and send him to call Panthers-Giants.

“If Greg Olsen isn’t the No. 1 color guy for one of the networks with (the) NFL next year,” The Ringers’s Bill Simmons tweeted Sunday, “I’m fighting everybody. He’s great. Let’s try not to (expletive) this up everybody.”

Olsen, though, looks like a very undeserved odd man out. This brings us back to Romo, Nantz and the rest of the CBS experience. CBS’ hands might ultimately be tied as Romo is right in the middle of a 10-year, $180 million deal. But if there’s any way CBS could get out of that contract or find some way to reassign Romo, it should certainly contemplate as much — at least if the network is committed to putting forth the absolute best broadcast, which might be pie-in-the-sky naivete. Can they just send him to Pebble Beach or Augusta and put him on the golf broadcasts?

As discussed on this week’s episode of “The Spread,” NESN’s football picks podcast, moving off of Romo would leave CBS with an obvious replacement: Olsen.

Finding a way to pair Olsen with Nantz is probably the only way to get the former Pro Bowler to CBS. According to Marchand, Olsen has a clause in his contract that allows him to leave FOX if he gets a No. 1 job at another network.

Whether Olsen could get the best out of the 64-year-old Nantz is up for debate. But as Romo took the broadcasting world by storm in 2019, Nantz admitted it helped rejuvenate him.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say that,” he told The Ringer. “It’s probably true. … I definitely feel like I’m trying to match up with Tony’s enthusiasm.”

Sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson also said she felt “reinvigorated” by Romo’s presence — at least back when he was still trying.

Maybe, as Front Office Sports mused this week, Olsen could land another top gig, either on Sunday nights as Cris Collinsworth’s replacement or on the Amazon broadcast for “Thursday Night Football” in Kirk Herbstreit’s spot. Maybe he goes into coaching.

No matter what, Olsen’s star is shining brightest right now, and he’ll do good work wherever he lands.

Ultimately, it’s all whatever. If you want to watch football, you’re going to watch football, and you’re going to endure whoever’s voice is describing the action to you. Just don’t be surprised if one of the storylines coming out of Super Bowl LVIII centers around the broadcast booth.