Kyle Brandt is closing one chapter just as he’s opening a considerably larger one elsewhere.
Brandt announced on X that he’s ending his five-season run contributing to CBS’s The NFL Today, thanking the network for granting him latitude he couldn’t have found on almost any other pregame show.
“Thank you to my friends at The NFL Today on CBS,” Brandt wrote. “We say goodbye after 5 years of One Shot / Many Takes. It’s very challenging to do something original on a pregame show, and the creative freedom + production value you gave me was staggering.”
Thank you to my friends at The NFL Today on CBS.
We say goodbye after 5 years of One Shot / Many Takes 🎥
It’s very challenging to do something original on a pregame show, and the creative freedom + production value you gave me was staggering. https://t.co/5LXtA8MrWc pic.twitter.com/x7T64IsWtS
— Kyle Brandt (@KyleBrandt) July 27, 2026
Brandt’s association with CBS stretches back to 2022, when the network first enlisted him to make regular appearances alongside his former Good Morning Football colleague Nate Burleson. That arrangement afforded him the freedom to engineer cinematic, single-take video essays that eventually crystallized into One Shot / Many Takes, a format with virtually no precedent anywhere on a traditional NFL pregame broadcast.
CBS goes with a Goodfellas-themed intro featuring Kyle Brandt. #AFCChampionship pic.twitter.com/ji62ZAgTuG
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) January 29, 2023
“Let’s go hit up an Applebee’s! I’ve got a hankering for some bottomless root beers.” -Kirk Cousins
— Kyle Brandt (@KyleBrandt) November 20, 2022
The departure dovetails neatly for Brandt, who according to Front Office Sports, is poised to join several ESPN studio programs once football season commences, with a recurring weekly perch on Get Up specifically floated as one probable destination, part of a sweeping integration of NFL Network personalities into ESPN’s daily programming following the network’s acquisition earlier this year.
CBS, meanwhile, is contending with upheaval that extends well beyond Brandt. Lead NFL insider Jonathan Jones announced this week that he’s departing the network after nearly seven years to join The Athletic as a senior writer. Matt Ryan vacated his analyst chair on the show earlier this year as well, decamping for a front-office position with the Atlanta Falcons. CBS has scrambled to patch some of that void by installing Russell Wilson and Kyle Long onto the pregame show’s panel alongside Burleson, Bill Cowher, and host James Brown, with Wilson sliding directly into the seat Ryan abandoned after logging guest appearances on the show during a Giants bye week last season.
Whatever CBS ultimately engineers for its pregame coverage going forward, it remains to be seen whether CBS attempts to replicate what Brandt constructed or allows that particular experiment to conclude alongside Brandt’s own tenure on the show.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.