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SI Media Mailbag: What Will We Hear From Tony Romo in 2023?

In Jimmy Traina’s SI Media Mailbag, he answers questions about Tony Romo, CBS’s new NFL booth, college football’s TV deals, ESPN Radio and more.

Jimmy Traina

Welcome to the 18th installment of a weekly mailbag that I will be writing about the world of sports media (and anything else you want to chime in on). Please email me any questions you have to Jimmy.Traina@si.com or send them via Twitter.

I don’t think Tony has “mailed it in.” I think Tony’s exuberance wore on some viewers and then there was a pile-on thing that happened in the second half of last year.

His partner, Jim Nantz, discussed this with me on SI Media With Jimmy Traina at the end of last season.

Romo is not going to call a game like Troy Aikman or Cris Collinsworth or Greg Olsen. He’s unique and has his own style. That means he’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

I still enjoy Romo’s work. I think he’s fun. I never watched a game of his in 2022 and thought he wasn’t prepared. However, I wouldn’t mind if he toned things down a teeny, tiny bit here and there. Romo is always at a 10. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if he was at an 8 sometimes.

I also think Romo has been hurt by whoever it was that told him to stop predicting plays. I loved it when Romo did this and thought it added a lot to the broadcast. Now he doesn’t predict any plays, and people say he’s unprepared. 

It will be fascinating to see whether Romo’s performance changes at all in 2023 after receiving so much negative publicity at the end of last season.

Great question. Jim Nantz is 64 years old, but while he just stepped down from calling the NCAA tournament, he has said he’s going nowhere anytime soon when it comes to the NFL. My guess is that Ian will one day call a Super Bowl for CBS, but it’s going to take a while.

I don’t know why the Eagle family is so popular this week, but I like it. With Noah calling the Nickelodeon Super Bowl alternate telecast in 2024, you may think he’s the first Eagle to call the Big Game, but that is not accurate. Ian has called the Super Bowl for the NFL Films World Feed, which gets distributed internationally to a wide variety of countries.

CBS’s new NFL booth of Andrew Catalon, Matt Ryan and Tiki Barber will call the network’s Lions-Panthers preseason game Aug. 25

The trio will also do a practice game in CBS’s New York studio next week. 

Catalon told me that Ryan, who will be in his first season doing TV, will join him and Steve Tasker in Buffalo this weekend for the local telecast of the Bills’ preseason game against the Colts, to be in the booth and listen on the headset to the traffic in their ears to get a feel for what doing a game is like.

I don’t, I find it shocking that ESPN won’t run Pat McAfee’s show on ESPN Radio. Maybe they’re afraid of the naughty language that might be used, but this seemed like a perfect fit.

I don’t think podcasts have made radio irrelevant, but I do think they’ve taken a decent chunk of the radio audience. I also think national radio in this day and age of everything being niche is tough. National radio hosts like Chris “Mad Dog” Russo and Dan Patrick all still do great shows and provide great interviews. Those are all major, A-list radio hosts. It does surprise me that ESPN doesn’t try to acquire some people like that for their radio business.

As I wrote in Traina Thoughts earlier this week, the debut episode of this season’s Hard Knocks was brutally boring. And Hard Knocks hasn’t been that entertaining in years. And now teams don’t want to do the show. Having said all that, I don’t think this is the end of the road for the show at all. Football fans are rabid; we are desperate for any NFL content we can get in August, and enough people still watch it to make it worth doing.

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I know I shouldn’t say this, especially as someone who covers media, but I’m going to be totally honest with you: I couldn’t care less about realignment and college football TV deals. Allow me to explain.

Every single Saturday during the fall and winter, from noon to midnight, I sit on my fat butt, bet a million games and watch college football. I love it. But I don’t have a team. 

So I don’t care if the Pac-12 is no more. I just want to watch the games. The college football television landscape is already a pain in the ass to navigate. Games are on CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, FS1, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNews, CBS Sports Network, Big Ten Network, ACC Network, SEC Network and others I’m probably leaving out.

So the Big Ten leaves ESPN and goes to CBS and NBC? Fine. The SEC will move from CBS to ESPN? O.K.

I’ve managed to find the games with the old TV deals. I’ll find the games with the new TV deals.

He should not get in, but the NFL Hall of Fame pretty much lets everyone in, so he has a shot.

What a terrible division. If I had to bet, I’d take the Saints at +120 because they have the best QB, even though I don’t think Derek Carr is that great. But I’d rather have my money on him than Desmond Ridder, a rookie in C.J. Stroud and the combination of Baker Mayfield/Kyle Trask.

This is an excellent question because I really want it to be Cody. Cody needs to complete the story. But if it can’t be Cody, I’d love it to be someone totally unexpected. The WWE had a really good thing going for a while with Sami Zayn; I think it would be fun if the company gave him a run.

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Jimmy Traina
JIMMY TRAINA

Jimmy Traina is a staff writer and podcast host for Sports Illustrated. A 20-year veteran in the industry, he’s been covering the sports media landscape for seven years and writes a daily column, Traina Thoughts. Traina has hosted the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast since 2018, a show known for interviews with some of the most important and powerful people in sports media. He also was the creator and writer of SI’s Hot Clicks feature from 2007 to '13.

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