Tony Romo's brain is different than yours, which is why he can see the future
On a Sunday about a month into Tony Romo's NFL broadcasting career, Derek Carr lined up under center against the Denver Broncos to orchestrate an unusual play. Deep in his own end with just four seconds to go before halftime, all the Oakland Raiders quarterback wanted to do was burn clock and hurl a pass out of bounds.
"It's gonna look weird," Romo told viewers on CBS as he articulated Carr's intentions before the snap.
"Rolling right, launching out of bounds, and Tony stealing the signals once again," broadcast partner Jim Nantz said moments later with a chuckle. "Well done, my friend."
Practically from the moment that Romo swapped his Dallas Cowboys jersey and helmet for a microphone, the retired four-time Pro Bowler has distinguished himself as one of football's most respected color analysts - in no small part because of his knack for knowing what's about to unfold on any given down, and for his willingness to flex this gift on live TV on a near-weekly basis.
The wonder Romo elicited from Nantz back on that day in October 2017 showed how quickly he made a habit of spoiling the designs of offenses around the league to his national audience. There was Romo in Tampa Bay that month, predicting, eight seconds in advance, the exact second that Buccaneers QB Jameis Winston would spike the ball on a hurry-up drive. There he was in Kansas City this past January, foretelling in real time the enthralling end to the Patriots-Chiefs AFC Championship Game.
In the weeks between that instant classic and Super Bowl LIII, an exhaustive Wall Street Journal review of CBS game tape found that Romo had guessed a play call on air 72 times in the 2018-19 season. He'd been correct on 49 occasions (68%), including 11 down the stretch of the AFC title game alone.
As Romo enters his third season paired with Nantz as CBS's lead analyst - a role from which he dislodged Phil Simms as a rookie, pushing his fellow former NFL pivot to the studio - his prowess as a prognosticator figures to be a continuing storyline. Will he maintain such a high success rate? What about the frequency with which he puts himself out there?
If Romo answers those questions in the affirmative, a third query will come to mind: What makes him so damn good at forecasting the future?
Romo addressed this matter head-on during his very first game on the mic, when he summarized to Nantz how he'd known a certain Tennessee Titans play call would be a run to the left: "I've seen football in the NFL for 14 years." The implication was clear - one doesn't readily forget a career's worth of experience memorizing playbooks and scanning opposing defenses in the taut seconds before a snap.
It makes sense that Romo's powers derive from his mental acuity and his devotion to the quarterbacking craft. But there may also be another important, complementary factor at play: the close proximity in time to his playing days. Fewer than three years since he retired, Romo can still think and anticipate the game like an active superstar.
In 2008, neuroscientific researchers in Italy showed a group of professional basketball players video of a teammate shooting free throws. They paused each clip at the moment the shooter released the ball, asking the players - as well as a sample of coaches, scouts, and sportswriters - to predict if the attempt would be successful or not.
How does free-throw shooting contribute to our understanding of Romo's genius? In the study, the pro players' predictions were correct a Romoesque 66.7% of the time, while the other group guessed wrong more often than right. The researchers detected greater excitability in the players' neurons when they saw a shot was about to miss, suggesting that their brains were processing the event differently - and more astutely - than those of other experienced basketball watchers.
When journalist Zach Schonbrun reflected on the study in his 2018 book, "The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience is Redefining Athletic Genius," he wrote that the results, along with those of similar analyses designed around volleyball serves and soccer penalty kicks, testified to the significance in sports of "active expertise." Players who operate at an elite level - or, by extension, who recently played their last NFL down - receive different cognitive cues than the rest of us amid the pressure cooker of competition, sharpening their perception of the action.
"These are the types of things that experts rely on to give them an advantage," Schonbrun told theScore earlier this year. "That's why they're so good at what they do, and I think that's why Tony Romo is so good at what he does."
Time will tell if Romo, as he gets further removed from his Cowboys career, will stay on the same wavelength as current and future NFL QBs. For as long as he's able to read their minds, the viewer, too, will be privy to what the player is thinking.
Back in that AFC title game, with the Chiefs leading by four points in the last minute of regulation, Romo and Nantz watched from above as Tom Brady assembled the Patriots' offense for a crucial third down. Romo pleaded with New England to station tight end Rob Gronkowski out wide by the sideline, and to target him with a pass in the event he wasn't doubled.
"They've finally got him. There he is," Romo said, circling Gronkowski and a lone defender, Kansas City safety Eric Berry, on the telestrator. "You just look up there and pick him." From there, he left the rest of the call to Nantz.
"Here they come after Brady. He goes down the field to Gronk! Turns around, makes the catch!" Nantz exclaimed, as the camera panned to Brady trotting upfield. "He saw what you saw, Tony."
Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore.