CBS Sports

• 1. Introduction

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  CBS Sports was formed on the 11th of April, 1955, making it one of the longer-running sports broadcasting operations in American television history. Its headquarters sit inside the CBS Building on West 52nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, while the programs themselves are produced out of Studios 43 and 44 at the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street. Two buildings, a few blocks apart, holding the machinery of American sports television.

  Over the decades, CBS Sports has built a roster of properties that reads like a survey of the American sports calendar: the NFL, the Masters Tournament, the PGA Championship, NCAA men's basketball and its tournament, the Big Ten, and more recently the UEFA Champions League. Each of those rights was won, renegotiated, lost, or regained across different eras of the organization. What does it take to hold onto a sports property for seventy years? And what happens when a partner of that scale announces a merger with a rival? On the 2nd of April, 2026, Paramount Skydance announced plans to combine CBS Sports with TNT Sports, pending the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

• 2. The Broadcast Rights Saga

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  College football on CBS dates back to 1950, predating the formal founding of CBS Sports itself. The PGA Tour and the Masters both began their runs on CBS in 1956, the same year NFL coverage started. Those two launch years tell you something about the priorities of the network in its earliest phase: golf and professional football arrived together.

  The NFL relationship had a significant interruption. CBS held the rights from 1956 through 1993, then lost them and returned in 1998. That five-year gap, during which the AFC games moved elsewhere, was a significant moment in the competitive history of broadcast sports rights. The network's signature NFL pregame show, The NFL Today, follows almost exactly the same arc: on air from 1961 to 1993, then back again from 1998 to the present.

  Baseball occupied CBS Sports for several distinct stretches, from 1947 to 1951, then 1955 to 1965, and again from 1990 to 1993. The NBA on CBS ran from 1973 through 1990, covering the league through one of its most celebrated eras. The NHL was a more sporadic presence, appearing in three separate windows between 1956 and 1980. NASCAR coverage, by contrast, ran steadily from 1960 all the way to 2000, including the Daytona 500 every year from 1979 forward. The Tour de France found a long home on CBS Sports as well, running from 1987 to 2010.

• 3. Voices Behind the Broadcast

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  Pat Summerall worked across multiple CBS Sports properties simultaneously, appearing in the play-by-play rosters for NFL coverage, PGA Tour golf, NBA broadcasts, tennis, and college basketball. His name turns up in more program listings than almost anyone else in the source record, which reflects how CBS Sports operated during much of its middle decades: a relatively small core of voices rotating across everything the network aired.

  The NFL Today studio show assembled some of the most recognizable names in sports television. Phyllis George joined the show as part of a lineup that also included Irv Cross and Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder. Later iterations brought in Terry Bradshaw, Deion Sanders, Dan Marino, Shannon Sharpe, and Phil Simms, among many others. James Brown and Nate Burleson currently host.

  The roster for NCAA March Madness coverage includes a notable overlap with the soccer coverage team. Grant Hill, who anchors college basketball analysis, shares the broadcast infrastructure with figures like Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher, and Peter Schmeichel on the soccer side, the last three of whom are former players at the highest levels of the European game. That breadth in the analyst pool reflects how much CBS Sports expanded its soccer footprint after picking up UEFA Champions League rights starting in 2020.

• 4. Building an Empire in Cable and Digital

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  CBS Sports Network launched in 2002 under the name National College Sports Network, then became College Sports Television in 2003. Viacom, CBS's then-parent company, acquired the channel in 2005. CBS rebranded it CBS College Sports Network in 2008, and finally CBS Sports Network in 2011. The shift in name signaled a deliberate repositioning: the channel moved beyond purely college programming to include coverage of minor professional leagues such as the Arena Football League and Major League Lacrosse.

• 5. The Branding Decisions

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  On the 31st of August, 2013, CBS Sports rolled out a graphics and animation package that had first appeared during its Super Bowl XLVII coverage. The same update shifted all CBS Sports programming to a 16:9 aspect ratio letterbox presentation, bringing the look of the NFL and SEC broadcasts into alignment under a single visual standard.

  On the 30th of November, 2015, CBS Sports unveiled a new rectangular logo. It premiered on-air during Super Bowl 50 coverage. The logo it replaced had been in use since 1981, meaning it had defined the visual identity of CBS Sports for 34 years. The stated goal of the new design was consistency across the division's platforms.

  In October 2020, CBS announced a unified branding scheme across all its major divisions, built around the CBS eye logo, a new sonic branding, and a corporate typeface called TT Norms Pro. CBS Sports implemented that new package during the lead-up to Super Bowl LV. The organization also received recognition during this period for its digital innovation: CBS Sports was honored at the 59th Annual Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology, specifically for its March Madness on Demand program.

• 6. The Merger on the Horizon

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  On the 2nd of April, 2026, Paramount Skydance announced that it intends to merge CBS Sports with TNT Sports once the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is completed. The two operations already share infrastructure on March Madness coverage; the NCAA tournament on CBS has been a co-production with TNT Sports for years, and the Road to the Final Four studio show currently features analysts Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith, both long associated with TNT's NBA coverage.

  The planned merger would bring together two broadcast histories that have already been intertwined at the edges. CBS and Turner co-produced the 1992, 1994, and 1998 Olympics under the TNT banner, and Title Night aired in 1998 as a co-production between CBS Sports and Turner Sports. Inside the NFL ran as a co-production with Showtime Networks from 2008 through 2023. The current presidents list shows David Berson has held the role since 2013, overseeing CBS Sports through a period that included the addition of UEFA Champions League rights, the expansion of soccer coverage, and now the announced combination with a direct competitor.