Culture
On the Super Bowl's biggest play, Tony Romo freelanced and lost
When Tony Romo became the biggest sensation in NFL broadcasting, it was because he was a gunslinger as an analyst, predicting plays with an unconventional style that eventually led to a 10-year, $180 million contract, then the richest known deal in sports media history.
These days, four years into that deal, after all the criticism of Romo, CBS clearly went into his third Super Bowl as a TV analyst looking for a game manager instead of a game changer. But old habits die hard.
On the final call to end the Super Bowl LVIII overtime classic between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, Romo and play-by-play partner Jim Nantz’s lack of teamwork showed up at the worst time.
At first, Romo did a fine job with the Chiefs down three points and inside the 5-yard line late in overtime, explaining that it did not matter as viewers watched the clock wind down toward zero — the game would not end and would just roll into a second quarter of OT. But Romo kept talking too long.
This blocked Nantz from properly setting up the final play. As the winning touchdown was scored, Nantz said, “First and goal, Mahomes flings it! It’s there! Hardman! Jackpot! Kansas City!”
THE CHIEFS ARE BACK-TO-BACK SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS! pic.twitter.com/ZzfhTyUXg9
— NFL (@NFL) February 12, 2024
Romo first muttered in the background of Nantz’s call as if he were a yahoo on local radio. After Nantz finished, Romo started in, “This was the Andy Reid special. …” And then on and on.
For 30 seconds, as CBS showed reaction, Romo talked about the play when the best analysis would’ve been silence, which would have allowed the crowd and pictures to tell the story. It should have been Nantz’s broadcast moment, if anyone’s.
Nantz and Romo were once supposed to be the next Pat Summerall and John Madden but have fallen so far that their disjointed performance Sunday was one CBS will likely take. Before the final play, the broadcast was far from perfect, but it was mostly manageable. Maybe not one to overnight to the Sports Emmys, but, on the production side, it had its moments.
Nantz and Romo make the big money — a near $30 million a year between them — so, like quarterbacks, they receive the most credit and blame. Their quarterback rating was not high enough, missing obvious big themes.
The duo failed to ever explain why the defenses — especially the 49ers on Travis Kelce in the first half — were having their way for so long with the offenses. They also were very underwhelming when CBS’s production team expertly spotted Kelce bumping and screaming at his 65-year-old head coach. They rarely spoke about line play. And the overarching themes of the game were often missed. There were no threads.
The grading for the Super Bowl broadcast is the highest level because it is the most prestigious assignment in American sportscasting. Nantz has called the game six times, but his partners, first Phil Simms and now Romo, have regressed under his watch. A bad trend.
Meanwhile, Romo lacks consistency in his thoughts. With 10 seconds left in regulation and the Chiefs at the 49ers’ 11, Romo said, “If you have six seconds, you feel comfortable taking another crack at it.”
After an incomplete pass, there were six seconds left, and Romo opined, “If he had seven, I’d do it,” adding Kansas City should kick.
Umm, but, Tony, you just said …
Never mind.
The inconsistency happens too much with Romo, causing CBS Sports executives to put on a brave face publicly and privately, defending him, but actions are almost always where the truth lands, and their truest thoughts seemed evident in their approach.
Early, it was clear, CBS’s game plan was to simplify the offense. In the first half, it cut down on the overuse of too many voices, sticking mostly to Nantz and Romo. Romo seemed chilled. It wasn’t bad.
The production team came up big in the second quarter. After Chiefs running back Isiah Pacheco fumbled, it found a sideline shot in which Kelce accosted Reid.
Travis Kelce looked less than enthused pic.twitter.com/yncKhjtNl4
— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) February 12, 2024
“He goes, ‘Keep me in,’” Romo said, apparently lip-reading. “What happened is, on the fumble, he was not in the game. Noah Gray went in, and he had to block. Noah Gray, the tight end, had to block (Deommodore) Lenoir. Lenoir made him swim and actually created the fumble. And I think Kelce is like, ‘Just keep me in there, even if we are running the ball.’”
Let’s put to the side we needed to consult Google Translate to go from Romo to English to understand what, “(Deommodore) Lenoir made him swim and actually created the fumble” might mean, the story is Kelce nearly knocking down his coach.
It wasn’t Latrell Sprewell on P.J. Carlesimo, but it was Taylor Swift’s boyfriend in front of about, give or take, 115 million viewers. We kind of needed the former All-Pro Cowboys quarterback to weigh in if that was kosher or not.
The best part of Romo is his unscripted fun personality. Non-hardcore fans can like him because Romo comes across as — and from all first-hand reports is — a genuinely nice guy. He would be cool to have a beer with, a good quality in an announcer.
Sunday, the most personality Romo showed was when he sang Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” to break, channeling another Cowboys great turned broadcaster, Don Meredith. Romo would do it again in the third quarter, trying to entice Nantz — who is a broadcaster from a Peter Jennings/Tom Brokaw anchor era — for a singalong to Elvis’ “Viva Las Vegas.” Romo even did a little Beastie Boys late with “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)!”
As for Nantz, he sounded extra amped to open the game, maybe overcompensating for some less-than-enthusiastic early calls in the playoffs. On the two Romo-isms of the first half, Nantz did correctly challenge him. Romo said a fumble might be a lateral in the second quarter, and then late in the period, with the scoreless Chiefs down 10, he said they might be in four-down territory. Nantz rightly threw the challenge flag on both.
In the end, the problem with the tandem is that despite all their “pal” and “buddy” talk, not to mention their over-the-top, on-air, “I love yous,” they don’t sound on the same page.
That disconnection shows up in the biggest spots, when the world is watching, when what you have done all season is on display.
Nantz and Romo should have the broadcast strategy of that last play down. Romo’s appeal may be that he is like a fan, but he’s doing the Super Bowl broadcast and being paid handsomely to do so.
He just needed to get out of the way to allow Nantz to make his complete call, then wait until after the pictures and sounds had their moment to note that Mahomes is Michael Jordan.
It wasn’t time for the gunslinger. CBS had the right plan, and Nantz and Romo executed at times. But, on the biggest play of the season, Romo freelanced and lost.
(Photo of Tony Romo and Jim Nantz: Rob Carr / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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