Credit: CBS Sports HQ
By Sam Neumann on

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It was a total upheaval at CBS this summer when Tony Romo was arrested on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated on July 23 in Milwaukee, cited for an open container and for unsafely passing cars, and later placed on indefinite leave by the network as he awaited a Sept. 21 court date.

The arrest came after years of mounting criticism over Romo’s preparation habits and his tendency to talk over Jim Nantz — criticism serious enough that CBS reportedly staged an intervention with him back in 2023 — but the network had stood by its lead analyst through all of it, including a 10-year, $180 million contract signed in 2020. The DUI arrest finally tested that patience, and CBS pulled him from the booth just weeks before the season, with no timeline for his return.

J.J. Watt, who had spent last season alongside play-by-play voice Ian Eagle in CBS’s No. 2 booth after joining the network as a studio analyst in 2023, was bumped up to fill Romo’s seat next to Nantz and sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson. That left Eagle needing a new partner, and he found one in Ross Tucker.

Tucker has been a fixture in CBS’s NFL rotation since the 2023 season, regularly working alongside Tom McCarthy as part of the network’s sixth broadcast crew. He also calls college football for CBS and handles radio duties for Westwood One’s Thursday Night Football coverage, rotating with Devin McCourty alongside Kevin Kugler. The Princeton alum and former offensive lineman also hosts the Ross Tucker Football Podcast for DraftKings and calls Philadelphia Eagles preseason games on local television.

Tucker made his CBS No. 2 debut on Sunday, calling Bills-Texans alongside Eagle and sideline reporter Evan Washburn, and by all accounts, the newcomer thrived in his first game in the chair that used to belong to Watt and, before him, Charles Davis.

Tucker’s debut earned him plenty of goodwill on a day CBS badly needed some, given the circumstances that put him in the No. 2 booth in the first place. He didn’t win over every last skeptic, and there’s still plenty of nostalgia out there for the booth of Eagle and Watt as it stood before this summer’s chaos, but on the evidence of one Sunday, CBS may have stumbled into the right answer to a crisis it never wanted.

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.

View all posts by Sam Neumann