MILWAUKEE – Jerry Jones wasn’t calling a play. He was making a character reference.
The Dallas Cowboys owner, whose relationship with Tony Romo dates back nearly two decades, went on record this week to defend the quarterback-turned-broadcaster who faces an operating-while-intoxicated charge in Milwaukee and an indefinite leave from the booth he spent the better part of a decade turning into must-watch television. “Do you think Tony Romo knows how to get up when he gets knocked down?” Jones told Dallas station KDFW Fox 4. “I love him. I love what he’s about. I love his character.”
It was a striking public defense of a man whose career at CBS Sports is now officially in suspension, though nobody at the network has said for how long.
The arrest happened on July 23. Romo had just left a golf tournament and was driving to his grandparents’ home in Milwaukee when officers stopped him for unsafe passing on the right and cutting across a gore, a traffic triangle that marks the divergence of roadways. He failed standard field sobriety tests at the scene and was charged with operating while intoxicated.
The case stayed quiet until July 29, when bodycam footage from the stop became public and restarted a news cycle the network had hoped was fading. Two days later, CBS Sports placed Romo on leave without a return date. His court date is set for September 21 at 8:30 a.m. CT, roughly two weeks into the NFL regular season.
That timing creates an uncomfortable situation for CBS. The network’s marquee Sunday afternoon broadcast has operated for years around the pairing of Romo with play-by-play anchor Jim Nantz, with sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson completing the booth. Romo built a reputation on predictive reads of opposing offenses that became a weekly ritual for NFL viewers. J.J. Watt has now joined Nantz and Wolfson as his replacement, at least for the near term.
CBS has not said the arrangement is permanent. But Watt, a three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year and a well-regarded broadcasting voice in his own right, is not a placeholder in the traditional sense. The network chose him specifically, and the implicit question in that choice is how long before “temporary” becomes something else entirely.
Romo is under a $72 million contract with CBS. That number complicates any clean exit for either side, and it may be part of why the network has declined to say what “until further notice” actually means in practice. As Yahoo Sports reported, Jones is publicly confident Romo will recover from the situation, though the process for getting there has not been mapped out by CBS or anyone else in a position to do so.
Jones, who picked Romo as an undrafted free agent out of Eastern Illinois in 2003 and watched him develop into the Cowboys’ franchise quarterback for more than a decade, is not ready to conclude that this ends the broadcaster’s career. His comments to KDFW suggested he views the arrest as a setback Romo is capable of recovering from, the kind of adversity the former quarterback navigated repeatedly during his playing days.
As NBC Sports reported, there is a scenario where Jones, whose Cowboys are broadcast regularly on CBS, could attempt to leverage that relationship if the network moved to cut ties with Romo permanently. Whether that leverage would matter against a contract dispute, or whether Jones would deploy it at all, remains genuinely unclear. What the report also suggested is that CBS had been “generally souring” on Romo before the arrest, which means the OWI did not land in a vacuum of goodwill.
Romo’s arrest on July 23 drew relatively limited attention at first, but the release of bodycam footage six days later transformed it into a story with real consequences for one of the NFL’s most recognizable broadcasting partnerships. His career before the broadcast booth gives Jones’s defense its only meaningful context. He spent a decade as a Cowboy, a franchise player who won regular-season games but never won when it mattered in January, who broke bones and came back and broke bones again. He became a broadcaster because he could explain the game better than almost anyone. That ability does not expire.
What expires is a network’s tolerance for complications when September is weeks away and a season opener requires a functioning booth.
Romo’s attorney has not entered a plea. The September 21 court date leaves roughly eight weeks of football before the case comes before a judge. What CBS does in the interim, whether it reinstates him before the opener or enters the season with Watt’s arrangement hardening into something permanent, will answer a question the OWI arrest created but cannot resolve on its own.
