Sports Media Biz: Jim Nantz Has Used Tony Romo to Back CBS Into a $17.5 Million Corner

[playahaitian]

Jim Nantz Has Used Tony Romo to Back CBS Into a $17.5 Million Corner
by Stephen Sheehan on January 9, 2021

For nearly 40 years, Jim Nantz has graced television screens for CBS Sports. Yet, his time with the company could be coming to an end. In fact, the legendary broadcaster has put CBS on a $17.5 million hot seat thanks to Tony Romo.

Will the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback be the reason Nantz leaves the network? Or will CBS find a way to retain one of its most popular and successful stars of all time?
Jim Nantz has been a star at CBS for decades



At 61 years old, Jim Nantz is certainly on the back end of his career. But the longtime face of CBS Sports continues to provide top-notch coverage for sports fans around the world.

Nantz joined the network in 1985 after spending his early years working in Houston and Salt Lake City. Since then, he has garnered widespread respect for his professionalism and skill. Nantz has served as the host of the Masters since 1989 and has been the lead man for the network’s NFL coverage for more than 30 years.
But after calling games alongside former New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms for years, the legendary broadcaster got a new partner in the booth in 2017.
Tony Romo has transitioned from Pro Bowl quarterback to highly-paid TV star



From 2007-2014, Tony Romo put up terrific numbers as the starting quarterback for the Cowboys. However, injuries brought a rather swift end to the four-time Pro Bowler’s NFL career.

That didn’t deter the charismatic California native from continuing to make a living through sports. After retiring from the NFL, Romo landed the lead NFL color analyst role for CBS Sports to work next to Jim Nantz.

The former Cowboys QB proved to be an instant hit. In particular, he drew praise for his ability to provide fans with specific insight into the X’s and O’s of the game. In fact, Romo has correctly predicted plays on multiple occasions from his spot in the booth.

CBS made sure to hold on to its breakout star by breaking the bank earlier this year. In February, the New York Post reported that Romo signed the largest sports analyst contract in TV history. After making about $3 million annually on his rookie deal, the former NFL star now makes about $17.5 million per year.
Ironically, his record-setting contract is having a major effect on his partner’s career plans.


Nantz has made it clear to CBS where he stands on Romo’s contract



RELATED: How Does Tony Romo’s New Salary Compare to Other NFL Broadcasters?
With his contract set to end next summer, Jim Nantz faces an uncertain future with CBS. And now, it looks like he has made it clear to his bosses where he stands on Tony Romo’s contract.

According to the New York Post, Nantz wants to top his broadcasting partner’s annual salary in his new deal. He reportedly makes about $6.5 million per year on his current contract.

Despite his age, Nantz does not seem ready to call it quits anytime soon. He recently made it clear that he wants to keeping calling the Masters past his previously-stated goal of 2035.

Still, he may not succeed in topping his partner’s lucrative annual salary. According to the Post, CBS views Romo’s contract as an aberration rather than a benchmark.
Ultimately, it will be interesting to see who wins this contractual showdown. Will Jim Nantz get CBS to meet his asking price? Or will the network remain firm that its biggest star’s record-setting deal won’t be the starting point for future negotiations?

Not even Tony Romo can predict how this situation will end.

 

[playahaitian]

CBS re-signs Ian Eagle with Jim Nantz ‘Romo money’ negotiations looming

With the looming Jim Nantz negotiations hanging over this Sunday’s Super Bowl 2021 booth, CBS Sports has re-signed Ian Eagle to a long-term contract, The Post has learned. Not only does CBS believe…

nypost.com

CBS re-signs Ian Eagle with Jim Nantz ‘Romo money’ negotiations looming
By Andrew Marchand
February 1, 2021 | 2:56pm | Updated




With the looming Jim Nantz negotiations hanging over this Sunday’s Super Bowl 2021 booth, CBS Sports has re-signed Ian Eagle to a long-term contract, The Post has learned.

Not only does CBS believe that Eagle is as good as any play-by-player in the business, the move gives it added leverage as Nantz seeks the same sort of contract as his Super Bowl partner, Tony Romo’s 10-season, $180 million deal.

Nantz currently earns $6.5 million per year. With a schedule that includes the Super Bowl, the Masters and the Final Four over the next three months, he wants to be paid akin to Romo. While he may want “Romo money,” he will have to create “Romo leverage.”

Like Fox did with its No. 2, Kevin Burkhardt, CBS locked up Eagle before he could hit free agency. Both Eagle and Burkhardt could easily be No. 1s.
CBS likes how Eagle finds the right pitch to constantly elevate his partners. He and Charles Davis had a big-game feel in their first NFL season together. Last year for TNT, Eagle immediately helped Stan Van Gundy stand out in his rookie year. The Nets’ analysts have repeatedly added national gigs while working with Eagle.

All this doesn’t seem to be a coincidence, which CBS Sports executives recognize.

Eagle will slide into pregame studio work for Super Bowl 2021 this Sunday. The exact terms of Eagle’s new deal are not known, but it is said to be longer than a standard three-year contract.

Besides the NFL, Eagle, 51, will call college hoops, while continuing as the lead TV voice on the Nets on YES and calling the NBA for TNT.
Jim Nantz’s upcoming contract looms over at CBS.Getty Images

While Nantz has considered giving up the Final Four — he already does a limited college basketball schedule — he has not done so yet. Nantz’s best sport is golf, which is his passion and he is among the greatest to ever call the sport.

Nantz, 61, has said he wants to be on the Masters until he is 75. Since 1956, CBS has retained the rights to the event on recurring one-year contracts.

Romo had leverage over CBS in a variety of ways. Most importantly, Romo had at least a 10-year, $140 million offer waiting for him from ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” according to sources.

With the Super Bowl on its air this year and with NFL TV negotiations on deck, CBS refused to let Romo go, even when it meant paying Romo around $10 million more per year than Fox’s lead NFL game analyst Troy Aikman.

With Fox having Joe Buck and NBC having Al Michaels/Mike Tirico, the one place Nantz could turn is Disney/ABC/ESPN. With a Super Bowl likely on the horizon in its next NFL TV deal, Disney could look to Nantz. It has the first two rounds of the Masters, but could Nantz eventually take the final two rounds with him?

Even with Nantz’s power in the golf world and his relationships with top officials at the Masters, it is a heavy lift.
https://nypost.com/2021/01/25/tony-romo-predicted-chiefs-buccaneers-super-bowl-2021-in-november/

ESPN has been cutting salaries and plans on keeping Steve Levy as its “MNF” play-by-player.

CBS executives realize that they own the events Nantz wants to broadcast, specifically the network’s vast golf offerings. This might be their greatest leverage.

Still, there has been a money wedge between CBS and Nantz. Nantz has made it clear he wants to be paid as much as Romo, feeling as if he works much more and has been the face of the network for decades.

On its face, it is not a bad case, but CBS has lined its defense better than it did with Romo. The feeling is Nantz will eventually return, but CBS has taken care of some important business with the signing of Eagle.

https://nypost.com/2021/01/28/new-jersey-is-the-new-king-of-sports-betting/
On TV, no matter what game you are watching these days, you are inundated with wagering promotions, making evident where everything is headed, beginning with the free-to-play nationwide platforms.

For example, Fox Bet’s Super 6 app — which was highlighted every Sunday with the “Win Terry Bradshaw’s money” tie-ins — resulted in nearly 2 million more downloads this season to give the app more than 4 million in total.

This is a free-to-play app — meaning sports gambling doesn’t need to be legal in a given state to participate — but this betting space will only grow with more legalization. Recently, Gov. Andrew Cuomo jumped on board with sports gambling in New York. What was the future is quickly becoming the present.

 

[Dr. Truth]

Ian Eagle is one of the craziest names I’ve ever heard . Cac says Eye-An. WTF

 

[jack walsh13]

CBS had to know this issue with Nantz was coming when they signed Romo.

 

[playahaitian]

Jim Nantz's salary breakdown: Can CBS announcer get 'Tony Romo money' in next contract?
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Jim Nantz will call Super Bowl 55 for CBS. Whether the network has him on board for any more Super Bowls could depend on upcoming contract negotiations.

According to the New York Post, Nantz's contract with the network will expire in the summer of 2021. And according to the Post, Nantz is seeking "Tony Romo money" in a new deal. Another report, from Front Office Sports, says ESPN is hoping to lure Nantz away from CBS once his contract expires.





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“In the last 30 years, Jim Nantz has become the face and voice of CBS Sports,” Nantz’s agent, Sandy Montag, told the Post. “The network has become synonymous with his voice and his leadership.”

MORE: Breaking down Tony Romo's contract at CBS

Jim Nantz's salary
Nantz, 61, currently makes $6.5 million per year on his contract from CBS, which expires in the summer of 2021. His role with the network involves him calling games during the NFL season and the Final Four along with working golf tournaments, including the Masters.

Nantz joined CBS in 1985. In his time with the network, he's called six Super Bowls (including Super Bowl 55). He's also previously stated he wanted to call the Masters through 2035, when Nantz will be 76, before saying recently he'd like to work that event even longer. Nantz is the one who coined one of the Masters' signature phrases, "a tradition unlike any other."

Jim Nantz's net worth
Nantz is worth $15 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. That's significantly less than his booth partner, Tony Romo, whose net worth is estimated around $70 million thanks to his CBS contract and a 13-year NFL playing career.

Can Jim Nantz get "Tony Romo money"?
Early in 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Romo signed a deal that pays him $17 million per season "for significantly longer than five years," according to the New York Post. That's the largest sports analyst contract in TV history.

Nantz would have to receive nearly a 200 percent raise to be paid more per year than Romo. While Nantz can make the case that he calls games throughout the year while Romo only does NFL games, that's probably not enough to make up the gap.

There's likely room to negotiate a raise, though. The New York Post writes that Joe Buck makes $10.5 million per year at Fox, with NBC's Mike Tirico in a similar range. Buck is the No. 1 NFL play-by-play announcer at Fox, just like Nantz is at CBS, and they both have duties in other sports, as well.


The Post writes that CBS views Romo's contract as an "aberration, not a benchmark." The network didn't have a viable replacement for the overwhelming popularity Romo had gained since coming on board after his retirement from the Cowboys.

While it's unlikely CBS would be quick to move on from Nantz, it did just lock up the network's No. 2 play-by-play man, Ian Eagle, according to the New York Post, which suggests that'll add leverage in negotiations with Nantz.

The Masters would certainly be different without Nantz on the call, because his voice in Augusta is definitely "a tradition unlike any other."

 

[playahaitian]

CBS had to know this issue with Nantz was coming when they signed Romo.

^^^^^^^^

KABOOM!!!!

 

[playahaitian]

Jim Nantz Knows What Life After CBS Looks Like

More than 30 years ago, there was a changing of the guard in the booth at CBS. What does Brent Musburger’s dramatic exit from the network tell us about Nantz’s future?

www.theringer.com

Jim Nantz Knows What Life After CBS Looks Like
More than 30 years ago, there was a changing of the guard in the booth at CBS. What does Brent Musburger’s dramatic exit from the network tell us about Nantz’s future?
By Bryan Curtis Feb 18, 2021, 6:30am EST
Getty Images/Ringer illustration
In 1990, Jim Nantz had lunch at a diner off Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway. His announcing future was on the menu. Nantz had turned 30 the year before, and his work in the booth and the studio had impressed his colleagues at CBS. One called him a “stone superstar.” But where the NFL always runs short of great quarterbacks, TV has the opposite problem. There are more potential no. 1 announcers than there are jobs.

Nantz’s career changed at that lunch. CBS had just lost its no. 1 guy after a disastrous contract negotiation. An executive sitting across from Nantz offered him one of the former no. 1’s biggest assignments: lead play-by-play of college basketball. March Madness. Nantz didn’t become the Nantz we know today at that moment, but the promotion put him on the path to becoming it. Hello, face of the network …

Recently, when I read about Nantz angling for an annual salary to match Tony Romo’s $17.5 million, I thought about that lunch. Of all people, Nantz knows what can happen when CBS’s biggest star faces off with management over a contract. Only the last time around, Nantz wasn’t the star. He was the understudy who benefited when the star left. The star was Brent Musburger.

In 1990, CBS came close to achieving a monopoly on big games. “We had what was being called at the time the Dream Season on CBS,” Nantz told me at a golf tournament a few years ago. “We had the NBA. The NBA Finals. We had the Super Bowl. We had, of course, the Final Four and the Masters. We had the dominant college football package, which at the time was called the CFA. And we had the World Series.” Watch the CBS promos. They were like a TV executive’s idea of a hype song.

Brent Musburger was the Dream Season’s dream master. In our deconstructed salad of a media universe, it’s hard to explain how much scenery Musburger chewed and the joy with which he chewed it. A “face of the network” was bigger back then, since the networks still claimed more than 75 percent of the prime-time audience in 1985. (The number dropped to 57 percent a decade later.) And Musburger was on TV all the time. “If you tuned in one weekend and didn’t see Brent Musburger on CBS,” a 1985 TV Guide article noted, “you probably thought you’d tuned in to PBS by mistake.”


In his years at CBS, Musburger called play-by-play of the NBA Finals and the Final Four. He hosted The NFL Today, the NBA, the Masters, college football and basketball, U.S. Open tennis, the Pan Am Games, weekend anthology shows, and the odd stunt like “The Human Fly.” For a time, he anchored the 6 p.m. local news on CBS’s Los Angeles affiliate five nights a week before hustling back to New York to do sports. By the mid-’80s, Musburger was on TV for 200 hours a year. As his NFL Today cohost Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder once said, “You going to do volleyball this week?”
Musburger made more money ($3.6 million per year, adjusted for inflation) than any other sports announcer. His eternal presence made him a divisive figure. But since Roone Arledge gave birth to Monday Night Football, sports TV’s aesthetic had landed somewhere between Mad Men and Anchorman. That was Musburger country. His catchphrase was “You are looking live!” Snyder once punched him in a dispute over airtime. On Saturday Night Live, Musburger was played by Kevin Nealon.

Musburger and his brother, Todd, who acted as his agent, were ace contract negotiators. In 1980, Musburger obtained a salary of nearly $1 million a year from CBS and became The NFL Today’s “managing editor,” a title snagged by Dan Rather. Four years later, Musburger doubled his pay and became the lead play-by-play announcer of college sports. In 1990, the Musburgers started a third round of negotiations with high aspirations. Brent wanted to call the World Series and play a big role on Olympics coverage.

Nantz arrived at CBS from a Salt Lake City station in 1985. As Musburger shed jobs (the college studio shows, Masters host), Nantz absorbed them. It felt like destiny. A few years before joining CBS, Nantz had gone to the Final Four and sat close to Musburger’s announcing perch. “I spent half the game watching the teams,” he told a newspaper years later, “and the other half watching Brent.”

In 1990, Musburger and Nantz went to the Final Four in Denver as CBS teammates. On March 31, Musburger called the semifinals while Nantz served as host. Afterward, they ate dinner together. When they got back to their hotel, Musburger’s assistant called him over. After months of negotiating Musburger’s role, Todd Musburger had pushed the network for an answer that night. CBS decided to end Musburger’s grip on the sports division and get reps for its young announcers. The answer was “no.”

Headlines would say CBS “fired” its no. 1 announcer. It was more accurate to say the network decided not to renew Musburger’s contract. The difference hardly mattered.

Again, our splintered media universe makes it hard to explain just how big Musburger’s ouster was. It was as if the networks canned an ’80s host of the evening news. Nantz noted the April 1 date and assumed someone was playing a prank. When it became clear CBS was serious, reporters realized they’d been handed a giant off-day story. On April 2, Musburger’s exit ran on the front pages of newspapers from Atlanta to Sacramento opposite the latest troop movements in Lithuania.

Mike Francesa, who worked as a CBS analyst and was part of the “Musburger Mafia,” was at the Final Four. He came back to his hotel room to find dozens of messages from journalists slipped under the door. A week later, Musburger went on a media tour that included stops on Good Morning America and Late Night With David Letterman. (Brent opened the show by announcing Dave as “my partner in the broadcast booth for the last 25 years.”)

Sudden media divorces—including several recent ones—usually aren’t all that sudden. CBS executives and Musburger had their disputes behind the camera. CBS “decided I was too big for my britches,” Musburger said later, “and that they were just going to take me down a peg or two.” He called the negotiations a “sham” and a “setup all the way.”

In Denver, the story had a final act. Though Musburger had lost his job in public fashion, he still went out to call the final game of the NCAA tournament the next night. Imagine if Sports Twitter had been around to do play-by-play of that. “Folks, I’ve had the best seat in the house,” Musburger told viewers after UNLV blew out Duke. “Thanks for sharing it. I’ll see you down the road. Now let’s send you to Jim Nantz.”


“All that I remember about that time,” Nantz told me later, “was people were trying to figure out What’s going to happen? What’s going to fall out of this?” Musburger’s exit opened up a bunch of career-making jobs. True to its word, CBS spread them around. Greg Gumbel got to host The NFL Today. Pat O’Brien got to host the NBA Finals. Jack Buck called the World Series. Nantz took over college basketball play-by-play.

Then the bills for the Dream Season came due. CBS had paid billions for its near monopoly; its Major League Baseball deal alone cost more than $1 billion over four years. By the end of 1993, the network had lost the rights to baseball, the NBA, and the NFL. But even during the lean period that followed, the network never let go of the Masters and March Madness. Nantz became the voice of those events. Thirty-one years later, he has a job as close to Musburger’s as any modern announcer could have. Two lessons from the Musburger saga are relevant today. Networks know viewers almost never watch games to hear an announcer. But out of a mixture of familiarity and a fear of the unknown, they reward announcers handsomely anyway. “We pay exorbitant salaries to nebulous entities,” an executive admitted in 1990. Then—when an announcer gets too big for his britches, or simply too old—the networks take everything back, disabling the superannouncer they helped create.

After leaving CBS, Musburger dusted himself off and had a great 27-year run at ABC and ESPN. In 2014, he was still calling the college football national championship game. But Musburger never had the same job he’d had at CBS. That job was a combination of seniority and identity. Just as CBS extracted plenty from Musburger, he drew power from being the face of CBS, as if the eye on his network blazer were a sheriff’s badge.
So far, Nantz’s negotiations with CBS seem far chummier. But when you contemplate Nantz calling Thursday and Friday at the Masters for ESPN, rather than Saturday and Sunday for CBS, the same question hangs over them. What’s more valuable, Tony Romo money or a job for the ages?

 

[kidmegaii]

All that money for what smh. Romo and Nantz aren't that entertaining. Might as well get that money