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Tony Romo knows he’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.
In a new interview with BroBible, the former quarterback turned NFL analyst — whose performance in the CBS booth has been heavily scrutinized this season — spoke about how the reaction to his commentary has evolved over the years following his standout debut in 2017.
“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,” the 42-year-old Romo said.
“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 former Cowboys quarterback said, remarking how the “negative stuff” is simply “just noise.”
Romo was lauded over his charisma and enthusiasm as a broadcaster in his first year on the job, when he joined veteran commentator Jim Nantz in CBS’s top NFL booth. Romo went on to sign a 10-year contract with the network — or $17.5 million per year — in 2020.
This season, however, the honeymoon between Romo and audiences has increasingly soured, with viewers and media critics skewering his analysis of the 2023 AFC Championship game. During last month’s broadcast, Romo filled in awkward gaps with silent pauses, not to mention sounding hesitant about plays.
“Tony Romo is the college kid who didn’t crack a book all semester but his sure-fire oral exam strategy is to smother the professor with enthusiasm, charm, bluster and every possible answer,” ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. tweeted at the time.
The Post’s Andrew Marchand previously reported how last offseason, CBS execs tried to help Romo improve his performance by staging “something of an intervention.” A spokeswoman for CBS Sports responded, “To call this an intervention is a complete mischaracterization, we meet regularly with our on-air talent.”
Romo recently spoke to The Post about how he is developing his craft.
“I mean, the ability to adapt and learn, if you never try to change at all — I just think like the best players in the world aren’t afraid of failure. You’re going to fail all the time, but at the same time, you succeed because of that, as long as you think about it and try to understand how to improve and then go about the process to make that happen, which is work ethic and commitment. But you got to have a plan for it before,” he said.
