Tony Romo will call his first Super Bowl as an analyst this Sunday for CBS Sports. And even though he’s only in his second year, he has quickly become one of the best and most popular analysts in the business.
One of Romo’s defining traits (aside from his excitable glee in calling games) is his ability to predict plays before they happen. Romo is able to put his knowledge as a QB at the line of scrimmage and his recency in knowing trends of various teams and coaches to work as he reads offensive and defensive formations and tells viewers where the play should go or where favorable matchups exist.
The most prominent example of Romo’s predictive capabilities came in the AFC Championship game where he correctly called almost every important play down the stretch. It was one of the great sports broadcasting performances in history. His Nostradamus like qualities has even taken on a life of their own outside football. He was asked about joining the Weather Channel and Bryce Harper has evidently left his free agent fate in Romo’s hands.
Well… looks like you’ll be playing for the Texas @Rangers opening day 😉 https://t.co/xVw1LDnm18
— Tony Romo (@tonyromo) January 22, 2019
Romo’s reputation precedes him at this point. But just how accurate is he, really? Amazingly, the Wall Street Journal logged the data on 50 hours of footage from games that Romo called this year to find out how often he was able to correctly predict the outcome. WSJ summarized their findings with some highlights of Romo’s hits (and sometimes misses) with this video.
The WSJ found 72 predictions over 2,500 plays, which is much less than one might expect (just less than 3% of total plays) from Romo given how famous his predictions have been. Amazingly, 11 of those came during the AFC Championship game from their research. Romo’s 68% overall hit rate on correctly predicting plays is actually incredibly impressive given how many different ways a play can evolve. And most of Romo’s predictions aren’t just “run” or “pass” but rather more detailed, either directionally or with a specific target in mind in the passing game.
So will we see Romo go all-out as he did in the AFC Championship Game or will he be more conservative and in line with his total season numbers for the Super Bowl? That could be up for you to decide. You can actually bet on Romo’s fortune telling during this year’s Super Bowl as one of the many prop bets for the game. The over/under is 7.5, so make your predictions wisely.
