Tony Romo knows you’re not thrilled with his color commentary during CBS football games.
Romo’s sudden descent from popular broadcaster to announcing pariah has been one of the focal points of this NFL season. Unflattering word has also emerged that CBS has tried to get the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback to care more about his work.
If you’ve ever been flummoxed by a recent Romo-ism, a lack of preparation is probably where a lot of this stems from. No matter what, fans are just growing tired of his shtick.
In an interview with Bro Bible (via Awful Announcing), Romo openly addressed the recent criticisms of his broadcasting work.
You’re always trying to do the right thing. At the core, there are just more people now who feel like telling me how they think I’m doing. I have people coming up to me on the street far more than my first couple of years.
At first, they’d mostly tell me how much they love to listen to me and all these positives, so it’s fun. When you’re young and you come out and you’re good, then you’re dealing with more expectations. You find out some people don’t like you and some people want you to do things differently and do this and that instead.
You’ve gotta stay true to who you are. You can’t please everyone. I know that because the number of people who come up to me has quadrupled since the first two or three years.
The thing is, the people who really love you aren’t gonna keep going out of their way to say, “I love you.” They’re not going to keep tweeting “He’s the best” every week, right? So, that goes away and then you hear more negative stuff, but that’s just noise.
Well, dang. People are literally coming up to Romo on the street these days telling him they don’t like his broadcasting work.
It’s a bit like that nightmare Woody has at the beginning of Toy Story 2 where Andy says he doesn’t want to play with him anymore, only to cast him into an unforgiving abyss of desolate toys.
Given that Romo was once the franchise quarterback of one of America’s most polarizing sports teams, it’s surprising to hear that his CBS work is garnering more public attention. It must be that fans are kind of stuck with Romo when he’s calling their favorite team’s games.
At least he seems very aware of the fact folks are tiring of his work. All you can hope now is that he takes all of this to heart and gets better at his job.
