CBS Sports is heading into the 2026 NFL season with presumably two open slots in its fourth broadcast booth.
ESPN re-signed Jason McCourty to a new multi-year exclusive deal on Thursday, pulling him away from the CBS booth he shared last season with play-by-play man Andrew Catalon, analyst Charles Davis, and sideline reporter A.J. Ross.
Davis is gone too, heading to college football full-time after being named Gary Danielson’s successor as CBS’s lead Big Ten analyst alongside Brad Nessler and Jenny Dell.
That leaves Catalon and Ross as the only returning pieces of a booth that has now cycled through three different analyst combinations in as many years.
Catalon spent the 2024 season working alongside McCourty, Tiki Barber, and Ross before Barber departed for WFAN to cover the New York Giants. Davis filled that vacancy last season, but only because he had been bumped from CBS’s No. 2 broadcast team — where he had worked alongside Ian Eagle — after J.J. Watt was brought in to take that analyst role for the 2025 season. CBS had already set the plan for Davis’s future in March 2025, when the network announced that Danielson — the longest-tenured lead college football analyst on any network — would retire after the season, with Davis as his replacement.
CBS, for its part, has been more focused on filling out its studio. Russell Wilson retired from playing to join The NFL Today, choosing CBS over a contract offer from the New York Jets, and Kyle Long was promoted to the main desk after years of working his way up through CBS Sports Network and Paramount+. The two join James Brown, Bill Cowher, and Nate Burleson on an NFL Today set that looks considerably different from the one it had a year ago, replacing Matt Ryan and Watt, whom the network originally chose not to replace.
There was perhaps a world where Long could have slotted into the fourth booth as part of a three-man team before his NFL Today promotion took him off the table. So the most logical internal candidate to step in would seem to be Logan Ryan, who spent last season working CBS games across both the NFL and college football.
Ryan shadowed Jim Nantz and Tony Romo for an entire week ahead of the Patriots-Buccaneers game in November, sitting in on production meetings and learning how CBS’s top team prepares, before Nantz brought him into the broadcast midway through the fourth quarter. It might not be the last we see of him in an NFL booth.
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.