One man walked away from a job. One man finished a life's work. That's the league's Thursday: Tony Romo and CBS Sports agreeing to part ways after his DWI arrest, and Jeff Van Note dead at 80.
The operative phrase in the Romo story is "agree to part." Companies and on-air talent only agree when a buyout is quieter than the alternative.
I won't pretend the tape was the reason. If calling a bad game got you removed from an NFL booth, half those chairs would be empty by November. The arrest ended this, and CBS decided one more news cycle of coverage would cost more than the settlement check.
Now the part I'll get yelled at for. The consensus this week will be that CBS cleaned up its broadcast. It didn't. It cleaned up its press release. The analysis was going to be the same product next Sunday either way, and the network's actual problem is the one it keeps repeating: it hires quarterbacks and hopes a broadcaster shows up. That's not a Romo problem. That's a pipeline problem, and it predates him.
Whoever takes the chair, my verdict is simple. Promote someone who has already done the job for a decade, or go find one. Hiring another freshly retired signal-caller with a ring and a good smile guarantees we're all having this same conversation in three years with a different name in the headline. The best analysts on television are mostly not the men who were best at football. Somebody at that network should write that on a whiteboard.
Jeff Van Note spent all 18 of his NFL seasons with the Falcons, made six Pro Bowls, and went into the team's Ring of Honor in 2006. He was 80.
Every obituary will lead with the six Pro Bowls. They should lead with the 18. In the free-agency era, a player switching teams is a Tuesday. A center staying with one franchise for 18 seasons is closer to a myth, and it's a myth Atlanta owns outright. Nobody is doing that again.
Centers get noticed when something goes wrong. Van Note got noticed six times, which tells you how rarely things went wrong anywhere near him. That's the whole job, and he did it for nearly two decades in a city that never got to watch him in a Super Bowl. My verdict: the Falcons should put something on the helmet this season, and it should stay there past Week 1. Some legacies are team records. His is the thing a franchise built its spine around.
