Traditionally, in sports broadcasting, a color commentator’s job is to explain to viewers what they just saw. But, during the past few weeks of N.F.L. playoff games, Tony Romo, a former quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, who will call the Super Bowl on Sunday as an analyst for CBS, has delighted football fans by doing something else: telling them what they’re about to see.
Romo, who retired two years ago, after a very good but not outstanding career with the Cowboys, has been doing this since he first became a broadcaster, last year. But his prophetic abilities were on particularly fine display in the recent A.F.C. championship game between the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs. On play after play—fifteen, in all—Romo described what he thought was about to unfold; he guessed correctly thirteen times. (On Twitter, he was dubbed Romostradamus.) He predicted passes to specific players in specific areas. He tabbed a coming blitz by the defense and how many people would be blitzing. “Gronk is out wide!” he said at one point, referring to the Patriots’ tight end Rob Gronkowski. “Watch this safety! If he comes down, it’s a good chance he’s throwing out there!” The safety came down, and the throw, from the Patriots’ quarterback, Tom Brady, to Gronkowski, was complete. Twice, the offensive team did something other than what Romo predicted, and both times the results were poor—one play ended with an incomplete pass, and the other with a turnover. It seemed that, even when Romo was wrong, he was right.
It is not surprising that the pioneer of this divinatory style of play-calling is an ex-quarterback. N.F.L. playbooks can be hundreds or thousands of pages long, and, for each play, the Q.B. must know the assignments of the other ten offensive players on the field. Before the ball is snapped, the quarterback has, usually, about fifteen seconds to set the offensive line’s protection scheme, read a defense’s disguised coverage, and decide if the play that was called is the right one. Mental processing is a talent, like lateral quickness or arm strength, and N.F.L. Q.B.s drill cognitive acuity as much as they do throwing mechanics. (Brady markets his own “brain training” techniques. Whether they work is another matter.)
But that Romo, in particular, would be the quarterback to blaze the trail is a surprise. Whereas Brady, widely considered the best quarterback in league history, exploits inefficiencies like a quant at a hedge fund, Romo was more improvisational—a little loose, even, as if he were just playing with friends in the back yard. “If you want me to tell you the truth, when I first got him, he was an indiscriminate passer,” Bill Parcells, the former head coach who brought Romo to the Cowboys, told me recently. “He’d throw that son of a bitch anywhere.”
If you go through old footage from NFL Films, you can find clips from early in Romo’s career that testify to Parcells’s description. During training camp in 2003, Romo’s rookie season, Parcells barks at his Q.B., “Come on, Romo, you should’ve known pre-snap what to do there!” In a quieter moment, the coach delivers a lecture on the necessity of thinking fast, lest Romo be crushed by the defense. “You gotta get the ball out of your hands. You’re gonna get killed. They’ll be licking their chops. You’ll be like liverwurst on rye!”
It’s not that Romo had a slow mind—it’s just that he hadn’t seen enough plays to start recognizing patterns. It’s hard stuff. To speed up the process, some teams now use virtual-reality video, captured during practice from cameras perched a few inches above a quarterback’s helmet, so that, later, he can take simulated repetitions. The quarterbacks coach at the University of Southern California once invited me to try one of these V.R. headsets, when I was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Going in, I knew the speed would be incredible. What I didn’t anticipate was that the action on the field would look like complete nonsense. The linemen heaved, the little guys flitted, and I felt as though I were watching a flock of birds in synchronous motion. It was fascinating to witness, but all the players appeared to be following some dictate that surpassed my understanding.
I asked Parcells if I watched enough film, thousands and thousands of hours, could I or another layman see the field like Romo does? Not unless I was an unusually quick thinker, he said. He didn’t sound optimistic.
Romo, though, learned to make sense of such disorder while riding the bench for three years. By the time he became a starter, he was one of the league’s best passers. He prepared diligently and thought quickly; very rarely was he liverwurst on rye. In the course of his career, he watched hundreds of plays from the bench, lived through thousands more on the field, and then relived them many times over in the film room—perfect training for a commentator.
But plenty of other ex-Q.B.s have called N.F.L. games, and none has done it quite like he does. “It’s not unique,” Parcells said, referring to the way Romo perceives the game. “The way he presents it might be.”
Romo has long delighted in talking. On the old NFL Films tape, you can see him babbling and bantering; he rarely shuts up. During one game, having seen something in the defense, he runs to the sideline and tells his coach that, if he calls the play that Romo wants, he’ll give him a kiss. (They run the play, and it results in a touchdown. No kiss appears in the footage.) His broadcasting style is similarly excitable—the tone is roughly that of a ten-year-old who’s really into dinosaurs showing his uncle the T. rex exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. At the end of the Patriots-Chiefs game, with the outcome hanging in the balance, Romo gushed, speaking to his boothmate, Jim Nantz, “Oh, my gosh, Jim, Tom Brady has the ball at the thirty-five to go to the Super Bowl!” Romo spends hours during the week watching film and talking to members of each team, and that preparation and passion fuel his gift for oracular gab.
His most satisfying calls combine enthusiasm with his intimate knowledge of the workings of a quarterback’s mind. In the A.F.C. championship, as the Patriots prepared for a fourth-and-one against the Chiefs, Romo mused, “They’ve gotta go back to the Brady sneak, don’t they?” Then the Patriots audibled. “Aw, they’re killing it!” he shouted. “Usually means a motion and run out wide to the right!” There was motion, then a run out wide to the right. It went for a touchdown.
Parcells is now retired, and, toward the end of our conversation, he told me about a running joke he has with Romo. Romo had gone undrafted as a rookie, and the Cowboys offered him a pittance for a shot at making the roster. The Denver Broncos were offering slightly more money, but Parcells persuaded Romo to come to Dallas instead. “Every once in a while, I’ll tease him about the one-hundred-twenty-eight million he made by signing with Dallas. ‘How’d that decision work out for you?’ ” Parcells said. “Listen, it’s just luck that we got him.” Luck, and foresight.
