Tony Romo, who will be released today by the Cowboys and reportedly retire, will join the CBS broadcasting booth and be paired with Jim Nantz as the network’s lead football analyst, reports John Ourand and Adam Schefter. Schefter adds that he might eventually broadcast golf for CBS as well.
While Romo being immediately hired for a broadcasting gig isn’t much of a surprise—ESPN earlier reported that basically every broadcast network was hot after him—it is somewhat of a surprise that he’s being hired into CBS’s No. 1 booth. There he will replace Phil Simms, who has been CBS’s lead analyst since 1998, and has been paired with Nantz since 2003. It isn’t clear whether this move would result in Simms leaving the network, or if he’d get bumped down to the No. 2 booth, which is currently helmed by Ian Eagle and Dan Fouts, or even further.
One complication, as Ourand reports, is that CBS has the Thursday night package for the first half of the season, and the NFL has previously mandated that a network’s top team call Thursday Night Football. So not only would Tony Romo be in the top booth as a broadcasting rookie, he would also presumably be broadcasting two games a week.