- May 21, 2026
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CBS has gotten out of the NFL Insider business.
Via Drew Lerner of Awful Announcing, CBS won’t be hiring an insider to replace Jonathan Jones, who recently left for a non-insider (in name) role with The Athletic.
It's no surprise. Last year, CBS decided to dump the insider segments from The NFL Today. Jones performed other roles for CBS Sports unrelated to the weekly Sunday rundown of news and notes.
As Lerner notes, the absence of Jones from the CBS pregame show was hardly noticed in 2025.
It's unclear why CBS made the move to not use Jones last year. One fair basis for speculation could be that not having an insider segment ensures that CBS will never be reporting anything that possibly would rankle The Shield. While potentially problematic items could be killed on a case-by-case basis, it wouldn't have taken much to get the word out that CBS, under new Skydance management, may have been putting the kibosh on anything the NFL may not have taken kindly to.
So just get rid of the function altogether, and problem solved.
The fact that few realized that Jones was absent from The NFL Today last season isn't an indictment of him. It's a reflection of the basic reality that the noon ET Sunday pregame shows have less relevance than ever before.
They'll have even less significance if the networks decide to stay away from developments that cut against the "everything is awesome" vibe that has become prevalent at most NFL broadcast partners and/or networks the NFL partially owns.
Via Drew Lerner of Awful Announcing, CBS won’t be hiring an insider to replace Jonathan Jones, who recently left for a non-insider (in name) role with The Athletic.
It's no surprise. Last year, CBS decided to dump the insider segments from The NFL Today. Jones performed other roles for CBS Sports unrelated to the weekly Sunday rundown of news and notes.
As Lerner notes, the absence of Jones from the CBS pregame show was hardly noticed in 2025.
It's unclear why CBS made the move to not use Jones last year. One fair basis for speculation could be that not having an insider segment ensures that CBS will never be reporting anything that possibly would rankle The Shield. While potentially problematic items could be killed on a case-by-case basis, it wouldn't have taken much to get the word out that CBS, under new Skydance management, may have been putting the kibosh on anything the NFL may not have taken kindly to.
So just get rid of the function altogether, and problem solved.
The fact that few realized that Jones was absent from The NFL Today last season isn't an indictment of him. It's a reflection of the basic reality that the noon ET Sunday pregame shows have less relevance than ever before.
They'll have even less significance if the networks decide to stay away from developments that cut against the "everything is awesome" vibe that has become prevalent at most NFL broadcast partners and/or networks the NFL partially owns.