Friday’s announcement that CBS and NFL analyst Tony Romo has “mutually agreed to separate“This hardly means that the separation was a joint decision. Romo had vowed to return to CBS; CBS clearly didn’t want him back.
Mutual agreement comes from paperwork. With Romo owed $72 million over four years, ending the relationship meant reaching an agreement on how much he would be paid to leave.
André Marchand Athletics writes that “CBS preferred eat up a lot of the remaining money» fighting with Romo over how much he would get. Marchand notes that the “exact figure” is “unknown.” As Marchand surmises, the fact that the situation was resolved without actual litigation or arbitration means that it was not trivial.
Our guess (and it’s just a guess) is that Romo will get between half and two-thirds of the money, or $36 million to $48 million. Although CBS may have had a silver bullet in the contract allowing for termination without pay for violating a broad and vague “morals clause,” it would have been difficult to make it stick based solely on an OWI arrest and resulting no-contest plea.
And the simple reality is that CBS used the situation as a way to pull the plug. If CBS felt the same way about Romo as they did when he signed his last contract, they would have found a way to excuse the situation and move on. He was already on ice at CBS, due to incessant criticism of his performance. The OWI arrest amounted to Romo jumping on it.
Romo still gets a significant portion of the money. But he doesn’t get it all, and he also loses the status and profile that comes from being the top NFL analyst on one of the few networks that airs NFL games watched by millions every week.
Gn sports
