Dallas Cowboys

Tony Romo's one drive under center in 2016 earned him $64.11

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 10:43 p.m. ET

Sports Illustrated, Dan Gartland/Sports Illustrated via Extra Mustard

If you thought Tony Romo’s brief Week 17 appearance was meaningless wait just a second—those seven plays earned Romo a cool $64.11.

Romo can attribute his windfall to the performance-based bonus system, which gives teams a pool of money to pay out based on playing time and a player’s base salary. The seven snaps he took against the Eagles on the last day of the season accounted for 0.47% of Dallas’s snaps for the year.

Do a little math and that works out to an extra $64.11 on top of the $20.835 million he earned in 2016. In other words, the bonus was .000308% of the money he earned last season.

NFL.com went through the whole list of performance-based payouts and highlighted a few oddities. My favorite is Ryan Wendell, an offensive lineman for the Panthers, who got $250.70 for playing exactly one snap on special teams.