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Credit: CBS
CBS Sports placed Tony Romo on leave Friday morning, “until further notice,” in its first public statement since his OWI arrest in Milwaukee last week
“Tony Romo is on leave from his role at CBS Sports until further notice,” the network said in a statement.
Awful Announcing has learned that JJ Watt will join Jim Nantz and Tracy Wolfson as the network’s lead NFL broadcast team during Romo’s absence, with CBS set to release the rest of its NFL on CBS roster at a later date.
Boomer Esiason told his radio audience barely a day earlier that he didn’t expect CBS to comment on the situation at all, a read that lined up with how the network had handled things all week. The Daily Mail had reported days earlier that CBS executives had already closed ranks around Romo, with one source telling the outlet, “I don’t want to act like it’s not a big deal, because it is. But it’s not going to get him fired.” A second characterized the arrest as a “lapse in judgment” rather than anything approaching a fireable offense, noting Romo had reached out to his bosses almost the moment it happened.
Romo was pulled over on Interstate 43 in Milwaukee County on the night of July 23, hours after competing in the Wisconsin Amateur Championship, and taken into custody after performing poorly on standardized field sobriety tests. Body camera footage of the stop later surfaced on TMZ, including Romo’s own reaction to the test results.
“Did I pass this test?” he asked. “No, I didn’t, huh.”
The situation escalated further when it emerged that Romo had an open alcohol bottle in his car at the time of the stop, during which Romo can reportedly be heard pushing back on the officer’s suspicion. “Because I’m coming from the golf course, you think that I’m drunk?” he said. Romo also withdrew from the Texas State Open in the days following his arrest, and currently has a court date scheduled for Sept. 21.
Friday’s decision lands atop a booth partnership that had already been fraying under scrutiny well before the arrest entered the picture. Romo has sat beside Jim Nantz on NFL on CBS since 2017, carrying a reported 10-year, $180 million contract through 2030, yet the chemistry that once defined the pairing had grown increasingly difficult to locate. The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand observed in January that Romo “doesn’t appear as if he does the homework,” and separately that whatever trust once bound him to Nantz “is not there.”
CBS offered no timeline Friday for how long the leave might last, or whether Romo calls so much as a single snap when the season begins.
The post CBS Sports places Tony Romo on leave, taps J.J. Watt to fill in alongside Jim Nantz appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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