When Tony Romo made the agonizing decision to retire from the NFL, even with teams still interested in signing him, broadcasting wasn’t even on his mind. But CBS presented an opportunity that felt too unique to ignore. As it turned out, he had unknowingly been preparing for television for years.
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After home-game wins, Romo would host friends and family at his house, breaking down drives and plays to help them understand football the way he saw it. He enjoyed teaching the game almost as much as he enjoyed playing it. Then, at Super Bowl LI in Houston in February 2017, a meeting with CBS Sports leadership became the first time he seriously considered broadcasting. CBS didn’t hesitate either, immediately installing him as its lead NFL analyst alongside Jim Nantz and in Phil Simms’ former seat.
“CBS Sports announced that analyst Tony Romo is on leave from his role ‘until further notice,'” Adam Schefter wrote on X, highlighting the network’s one-sentence press release issued on July 31. “For the time being, analyst JJ Watt will replace Tony Romo and work alongside Jim Nantz and Tracy Wolfson.”
Whether this is a permanent move or not, the network still hasn’t said. CBS has told reporters only that it will “release the remainder of its NFL on CBS roster at a later date,” which suggests even the network hasn’t finished deciding how the rest of its lineup will shake out. That kind of silence, three weeks before the preseason opener, tends to mean more is still being worked out behind the scenes. But here’s the part most coverage has glossed over:
JJ Watt is not a surprise hire plucked from outside the building. He’s been inside CBS Sports for three full NFL seasons already.
He joined “The NFL Today” as a studio analyst in 2023, right after retiring from the league, and spent two seasons building his on-air reputation from behind the desk. Then, ahead of the 2025 season, CBS moved him out of the studio entirely and into the game booth, pairing him with play-by-play voice Ian Eagle and sideline reporter Evan Washburn on the network’s No. 2 broadcast team. That means Watt walks into this assignment having already called a full season of live NFL games. This is quite in contrary to what things had looked like for Romo.
Romo arrived with zero broadcasting experience, and it showed at first, so CBS football producer Jim Rikhoff spent hours running him through old, silent broadcasts to build his instincts before he ever went live. “We rehearsed old games, took the audio off, did a lot of trial and error,” Rikhoff later told Variety, describing the process that eventually shaped Romo into the league’s most talked-about analyst.
For his part, what Watt hasn’t done before is work alongside Jim Nantz or Tracy Wolfson in a regular booth. Romo has been Nantz’s partner since 2017, and Wolfson has spent years alongside that pairing as CBS’ lead sideline reporter, while Watt’s assigned team down in the No. 2 slot ran through Eagle and Washburn. So this shuffle doesn’t just swap one analyst for another, it breaks up two long-running broadcast partnerships at once, even if only temporarily. Watt’s style also isn’t a Romo impression, and CBS doesn’t appear to want it to be.
Where Romo built his reputation calling out plays before they happened, Watt, a three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year — leans on explaining why a front, rush, or coverage develops the way it does, drawing on a Hall-of-Fame-caliber defensive career rather than trying to out-predict his predecessor. Early reaction from people inside sports media has generally been favorable, with the recurring praise being that he sounds conversational rather than rehearsed.
Neither man has commented on this specific move, either. Watt hasn’t addressed being elevated, and Romo hasn’t addressed being sidelined. Given how sensitive the legal situation is, CBS appears to be keeping the entire story as contained as possible, since Romo’s recent fallout with the law has created plenty of attention already.
On July 23, the former Cowboys QB was pulled over by the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office while driving a black Jeep on Interstate 43, at approximately 6:18 PM, after playing in the Wisconsin Amateur Championship golf tournament. Romo, notably, grew up in Wisconsin, which explains both the golf trip and his claim to officers that he was headed to visit his grandparents.
According to the sheriff’s office arrest report, a deputy spotted Romo driving erratically during heavy rush-hour traffic, weaving within his lane, crossing the center line, and using the right shoulder to pass multiple vehicles. When police asked him to take a sobriety test, he failed it. Body-camera footage that later surfaced showed Romo pushing back on the stop itself, at one point asking the officer, “Because I’m coming from the golf course, you think that I’m drunk?” He was booked into jail, and officers later reported finding an open bottle of alcohol in the car; Romo was also cited for refusing a breathalyzer test.
Because this is Romo’s first offense, the OWI is being processed as a civil traffic infraction under Wisconsin law rather than a criminal charge. He also withdrew from the Texas State Open in the days following the arrest, which suggests the fallout has already reached beyond his broadcasting career. He was booked, processed, and released the same night. His mugshot, notably, showed him smiling.
Romo had joined CBS in 2017 as its lead NFL analyst, and he gained attention for his ability to diagnose and predict plays on air. His early success drew reported interest from other networks, including ESPN, and CBS moved to lock him up before he could test the open market.
In early 2020, the two sides agreed to a long-term extension widely reported as a 10-year deal worth roughly $180 million total, around $17 million to $17.5 million per year in base pay, with perks like private travel and an assistant pushing the total value closer to $18 million annually. That made him the highest-paid NFL analyst in television at the time. Recent reporting puts a finer point on where things stand today: Romo is currently owed close to $72 million over the remaining four years of the deal, a figure that lines up neatly with a contract designed to run through roughly the 2030 season.
For context, that annual salary alone exceeds what most active NFL players earn in a season, and it comfortably surpasses Romo’s own 14-year playing earnings with Dallas, about $127 million total, according to Spotrac. It’s also worth noting what Romo still holds, on the field, even as an analyst: he remains the Cowboys’ all-time leader in touchdown passes with 248, though Dak Prescott, five behind him entering this season, is on pace to break that record too. Prescott already passed him for career passing yards in November 2025, meaning Romo now sits second on that list after holding it for nearly a decade.
For CBS, this isn’t a contract the network can walk away from lightly. Bench him, and the network is still paying one of the highest salaries in sports broadcasting for someone not on the air. Furthermore, Romo’s leave didn’t hit a stable lineup, but one that was already mid-shuffle.
Jason McCourty, who had been calling games for CBS’s No. 4 broadcast team alongside Andrew Catalon, signed a new multi-year exclusive deal with ESPN this summer, pulling him off CBS games entirely. Charles Davis, who worked that same booth, is also gone from the NFL side; he’s shifting to lead college football coverage. That leaves CBS needing to rebuild an entire fourth broadcast team from scratch, on top of now finding a temporary answer for its No. 2 booth, since Watt’s move up leaves a hole next to Ian Eagle.
Speculation about who fills that gap has run in a few directions. One theory making the rounds points to Russell Wilson, who retired from playing in June after turning down a backup offer from the New York Jets and instead joined CBS’s “The NFL Today” as a studio analyst, replacing Matt Ryan after Ryan left to become the Atlanta Falcons’ president of football.
But industry reporting suggests the more likely fix is an internal one: CBS may simply move existing analysts up a rung, shifting Trent Green into Eagle’s booth, sliding Ross Tucker into Green’s old spot, and having Logan Ryan step into the vacancy left by McCourty and Davis, rather than pulling Wilson, who is only newly settled into a studio role, into a live game booth.
On September 21, 2026, the 46-year-old Romo is scheduled to make his formal court appearance, a date that falls right in the middle of Week 2 of the NFL regular season, which kicks off September 9. CBS is set to air its first preseason game on August 28 and is expected to announce its early-season broadcast assignments in the coming weeks, which should finally clarify whether this is a short absence or something CBS could make permanent. Until then, the only certainty is who’s in the booth on Sunday: Nantz, Wolfson, and, for the first time, Watt.