On the evening of Thursday, July 23, 2026, a Milwaukee County sheriff's deputy stopped a car on the I-43 high-rise bridge. The driver was Tony Romo, the former Dallas quarterback and, since 2017, the lead NFL analyst at CBS. He was arrested on suspicion of operating while intoxicated, first offense. He was booked around 9:45 that night and released around 11. He is due in court on September 21.
Start with the part that matters most. Nothing has been proven. An arrest is an accusation, and Romo is presumed innocent exactly like anyone else who gets pulled over on a Thursday evening. As of this writing, no breath or blood result has been reported publicly, CBS has declined to comment, and neither Romo nor a lawyer for him has made a statement.
I have no connection to the case and no inside knowledge of it. What I do have is a Florida DUI practice and a habit of noticing when a headline quietly contains something worth teaching. This one contains two.
Wisconsin is the only state where this is not a crime
Here is the fact that surprises almost every lawyer who does not practice in Wisconsin. A standard first-offense OWI there is not a criminal charge at all. It is a civil forfeiture under Wis. Stat. s. 346.65(2)(am)1. No jail exposure. No criminal record.
Wisconsin is alone in this. Every other state in the country treats a first impaired driving offense as a crime.
That does not mean it is nothing. A Wisconsin first offense still carries a license revocation, an alcohol assessment, surcharges that dwarf the underlying fine, and in some situations an ignition interlock. Total out-of-pocket costs routinely run past fifteen hundred dollars before anyone's insurance company gets involved. Wisconsin also uses a lifetime look-back, so that civil first offense sits on the record permanently and turns any future OWI into a criminal misdemeanor or a felony.
There are exceptions that make even a first offense criminal, including a child under sixteen in the car and an OWI causing injury. On what has been reported so far, neither appears to be in play here.
The same traffic stop in Florida
Move that identical stop from the I-43 bridge to the Howard Frankland and the picture changes completely.
A first DUI in Florida is a criminal offense under section 316.193, Florida Statutes. It is a misdemeanor, with a fine, possible jail exposure, community service, vehicle impoundment, DUI school, and a license revocation. If a breath result comes back at 0.15 or higher, or if there is a minor in the car, the exposure goes up from there.
And then there is the part that outlasts all of it. A Florida DUI conviction cannot be sealed or expunged. Not after a year of good behavior, not after ten years, not ever. It sits on the record permanently, visible to every employer, every landlord, and every licensing board that runs a background check for the rest of a person's life.
Same conduct. Same evening. One state calls it a civil forfeiture. The other hands a person something they carry forever.
I am not arguing Wisconsin has it right and Florida has it wrong, or the reverse. I am pointing out something that many folks find genuinely startling, which is how much of the consequence of a DUI depends on which side of a state line the traffic stop happened on.
The evidence in the story is the roadside, not a number
The other thing worth noticing is what the reporting actually says.
According to the arrest report, Romo "performed poorly on field sobriety tests." That is the reported basis. No chemical number has surfaced publicly. Whether one exists, and what it shows, is not something the public knows right now.
I spend a lot of my working life on that exact category of evidence, and I hold both the NHTSA practitioner and instructor certifications in standardized field sobriety testing, which means I am qualified to teach the course the officer took. So let me be blunt about that phrase.
"Poor performance" is boilerplate. I have read a great many DUI reports, and some version of it appears in nearly all of them. It shows up whether the person stumbled badly or did fine, because by the time an officer is writing the narrative, he has already made the arrest, and the narrative exists to support the decision he already made. It is a conclusion wearing the costume of an observation.
Consider what is actually being asked. There are three standardized exercises: horizontal gaze nystagmus, the walk and turn, and the one leg stand. The last two are divided attention tasks, meaning you have to follow verbal instructions while doing something physical, which is genuinely difficult under the best conditions. And roadside is nowhere near the best conditions. You are on the shoulder of a highway at night. Cars are going by a few feet away. There are headlights and a light bar in your eyes. The ground is sloped, because road shoulders are sloped by design so they drain. You are wearing whatever shoes you happened to put on that morning. You are frightened, because a police officer has just pulled you over and is watching you.
Now add the things that have nothing to do with alcohol. Age. Weight. Knee, back, and ankle injuries. Inner ear problems. Fatigue after a long day. Any of these can produce exactly the clues the officer is trained to count.
And the counting is the part many folks miss. Nobody measures anything. There is no instrument, no number, and no printout. The officer decides how many clues he saw, using criteria he applies in his own head, about a person he has already decided to ask out of the car. Then he writes down that the performance was poor.
So when a report says someone performed poorly, the honest response is not to accept it and not to reject it. It is to ask the questions the phrase is designed to skip past. Where exactly was the person standing, and what was behind the officer's shoulder. Was the surface level. What were the instructions, word for word, and were they given the way the manual requires. What was the person wearing on their feet. And most of all, is there video, and does the video match the words in the report. The number of times those two things do not match is the reason I do this work the way I do.
None of that is an accusation against this deputy, and I want to be clear about it. I have not seen a report, a video, or a shred of discovery in this case, and neither has anyone else outside it. The point is narrower and it applies everywhere. "Performed poorly" is where the analysis starts. Far too often it is treated as where the analysis ends.
The clean story and the accurate one
If you have read anything else I have written, you know this is the thing I keep circling back to.
A police report is a story told by one participant, written after the fact, in language built to support a conclusion the writer had already reached by the time the pen came out. Sometimes it is completely accurate. Often it is accurate in outline and wrong in the details that decide a case. The system tends to reward the clean story over the accurate one, because the clean story is easier to tell and easier to believe.
Testing that is not a technicality and it is not a trick. It is the only mechanism anyone has for finding out whether the story matches the evidence.
That is true when the driver is a household name whose arrest lands on ESPN by morning. It is equally true, and far more consequential, when the driver is a nurse or a contractor or a college student whose name never appears anywhere, who cannot afford to lose a license, and whose case will be resolved in a courtroom nobody is watching.
Tony Romo will have excellent lawyers and a court date in September. Plenty of folks facing the same accusation get far less attention and have far more riding on the outcome.
One last thing, and I mean it sincerely. I am a fan. Romo is the best analyst working in football, the guy who calls the play before the snap and makes you feel like you are watching the game with a friend who happens to be brilliant at it. Nothing about a bad night on a bridge in Milwaukee changes that, and nothing about it tells you who he is.
That is not me being soft on impaired driving. It is the whole reason I took this job. The people who walk into my office are having the worst week of their lives, and almost none of them are the person their arrest report makes them out to be. Everybody deserves to be seen as more than their worst day. That includes the guy on television, and it includes you.
I wish him the best.
Nothing here is legal advice, and none of it is a comment on the merits of any pending case. Mr. Romo is presumed innocent, and the facts described are drawn from public reporting as of this writing.
Sources:ESPN, FOX6 Milwaukee, NBC News
