CBS is shaking up its college — and pro — football coverage, with Gary Danielson signing off after this season, Charles Davis set to replace him, and JJ Watt set to replace Davis.
CBS Sports announced Wednesday that Danielson, its lead college football analyst since 2006, will retire at the end of the coming 2025 season and be replaced by its #2 NFL analyst Charles Davis — who starting this season will be replaced in that role by JJ Watt.
The Watt news — which was first reported by Andrew Marchand of The Athletic — is the most noteworthy of the moves, setting the 36-year-old analyst on a path toward greater prominence. He had been an analyst on the CBS pregame show “The NFL Today.”
As for Davis, who joined CBS in 2020 after previously working as an NFL analyst for Fox Sports, the change is a clear demotion. As the #2 NFL analyst on CBS, Davis called a Wild Card playoff game for the network in January. There is no college football package that can match even a “B” slate of NFL games in terms of audience reach, much less the CBS Big Ten deal, in which the network only occasionally gets the top game of a given week.
Davis — who was the lead college football analyst for TBS and later Fox Sports in the 2000s, including calling the BCS National Championship Game for FOX from 2007-09 — will continue to work NFL games this season, though it is unclear where he will be on the depth chart.
With the Watt announcement, CBS would seem to have a long-term plan in place for its “B” team. Eagle, it should be noted, has often been mentioned as a potential candidate for the Thursday Night Football play-by-play job on Amazon once Al Michaels retires.
The retiring Danielson spent most of his CBS tenure calling the network’s SEC game of the week alongside Verne Lundquist and later Brad Nessler. With the “SEC on CBS” often ranking as the most-watched window in a given college football season, he became one of the most prominent analysts in the sport — and a target for criticism among SEC fans on social media. Prior to joining CBS, he had stints with ESPN and ABC as part of a 36-year broadcasting career.
