In their seventh season together as CBS’s top NFL broadcast team, Tony Romo and Jim Nantz might be having more fun than their audience.
Late in the fourth quarter of the Detroit Lions-Los Angeles Chargers matchup on CBS, Romo picked up on an audible from quarterback Justin Herbert at the line of scrimmage. With the Chargers trailing Detroit by a touchdown, Herbert had his team around midfield as they looked to tie the game.
“Down ziggy, down ziggy,” Herbert yelled, catching Romo’s ear. In Romo’s early years on CBS, he would have taken the cue from Herbert to provide the audience with a prediction of which play the Chargers were going to run next. And many times, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback’s prophecy would prove to be correct, garnering him the nickname “Romostradamus.”
So what play was Romo going to predict on the heels of hearing “down ziggy” from Herbert? A run, a pass, something deep, something short, something to the left, or maybe even the right side of the field?
“Sounded like ‘down ziggy, down ziggy,’” Romo noted. “Which tells me, let’s get down and get jiggy with it, like you like to, Jim.”
Nantz didn’t deny that he likes to get down and jiggy with it as he tried his best to entertain Romo’s analysis. “Right,” Nantz said after a polite chuckle.
“That was the best I could come up with,” Romo sheepishly admitted. “My wife would have said, ‘Just stop.’
“That was good,” Nantz insisted. “You know me well.”
Maybe Romo knew “down ziggy” meant Herbert was going to hand the ball off to Austin Ekeler for a run play up the middle. Or maybe, the luster of Romostradamus has started to wear so he opted to hit Nantz with a dad joke instead of a prediction.
Nantz and Romo’s chemistry has always been fine. They found their secret sauce and it works, to an extent. But the lure of Romo’s predictions is what made him an overnight sensation as an analyst, and as he gets further removed from the playing field, those prognostications have been harder to find. Setting the audience up for a grand prediction only to hit them with a dad joke instead is somewhat symbolic of the drop-off CBS’s lead NFL booth has endured in recent years.
[CBS]
