Last season was a pretty rough year for CBS NFL analyst Tony Romo in the eyes (and ears) of many football fans. His schtick started to wear thin for some NFL audiences, especially when he was calling a game featuring one of the league’s top quarterbacks. His affinity for Buffalo’s Josh Allen and Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes is well-documented and derided.
One of Romo’s most infamously strange moments from the 2022-2023 NFL season came during the AFC Championship Game when he described a Mahomes pass by saying “The wizard is still…wizardry.”
We're still not sure what to make of Tony Romo's "the wizard is still…wizardry." pic.twitter.com/8lbiHWmB2L
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) January 30, 2023
Well, it sounds like the wizard will be lots of wizardry in 2023-2024 as, according to Jim Nantz, the broadcasting duo has the potential to call as many as nine Kansas City Chiefs games next season.
“The first one I see is Kansas City vs. Minnesota, Week 5,” Nantz said to Rich Eisen on Friday when asked how many Chiefs games he expects to cover this year. “KC is arguably the biggest catch in the entire schedule for anybody. We know about the Dallas history, everybody wants the Cowboys, but KC is on that level now as the champs with Mahomes.
“Two weeks later, Week 7 to be exact, I anticipate we’ll be doing Chargers at KC… And then we’ll see them again Weeks 14, 16, and 17…in the month of December, [I’m] basically gonna live in KC. I’ve got Buffalo at KC Week 14, Vegas at KC on Christmas Day, Cincinnati at KC on New Year’s Eve, so those are blockbuster games. Buffalo and Cincinnati, especially.
Eisen then added that “You may have, who knows, obviously, back-to-back-to-back Chiefs games when the playoffs begin.”
Nantz said that it’s hard to predict how things will play out, but “there’s a really strong chance we’d see them Divisional Weekend and AFC Championship Week, and maybe even in Las Vegas [for Super Bowl LVIII]. So, you add it up, if they were to make that kind of run all the way to the Super Bowl, I think it adds up to nine games that we would see… Eight or nine games of the Chiefs.”
The longtime broadcaster added that it’s not uncommon for him to follow a notable team for a large portion of an NFL season.
“This is what it used to be like…back in the Brady-Belichick days,” Nantz said. “Phil [Simms] and I would do 8 or 9 Patriots games a year, riding them through the playoffs and the regular season. They were the flagship team of the network at that time and rightfully so, and KC is in this era.”
Awful Announcing did a quick search and we found that Nantz and Simms called eight Patriots games in 2012, which appears to be their high water mark. Nantz and Simms also called seven Denver Broncos games apiece in 2013 and 2014 when Peyton Manning was their quarterback.
A quick check also revealed that Pat Summerall and John Madden called nine New York Giants games in the 1986 season en route to their Super Bowl victory. Considering CBS also has the Super Bowl this season, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that you’ll be hearing Nantz and Romo delight in Patrick Mahomes’ “wizardry” many times in the months ahead.
And for the record, Summerall and Madden called eleven Dallas Cowboys games in both 1995 and 1996, so thank goodness Twitter wasn’t around then to complain about Madden fawning over Troy Aikman.
[The Rich Eisen Show, H/T: Barrett Sports Media]
