CBS Officially Adds Super Bowl-Winning Coach Along With Brian Kelly As College Football Analysts

Two curious moves are afoot for the broadcaster.

Brian Kelly watches LSU’s 2025 game against South Carolina. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

CBS has formally hired two new college football analysts ahead of the 2026 season—and they’re sure to be two names you recognize.

Former Notre Dame and LSU coach Brian Kelly and former Eagles and Jaguars coach Doug Pederson have joined the network, CBS announced Monday afternoon. Kelly will serve as an occasional game analyst and contribute to a pair of the company’s studio shows, while Pederson will serve as an occasional game analyst on CBS Sports Network exclusively.

For both coaches, it marks a return to football after their last coaching gigs ended unceremoniously. For Kelly in particular, the assignment comes after months of speculation and a lengthy press tour.

Kelly has never taken a year off from coaching

One year after receiving his political science degree from Division II Assumption in Worcester, Mass., Kelly was named the Greyhounds’ defensive coordinator (and softball coach). Since then, he has worked his way up through the coaching ranks almost uninterrupted.

At Division II Grand Valley State, Kelly won back-to-back national titles in 2002 and `03. He helped Central Michigan to its first 10-win season in a generation in 2006, and steered Cincinnati to within a last-second Texas win over Nebraska of the national championship game in 2009. He is the Fighting Irish’s winningest coach on the field (i.e. discounting vacated wins), and he won 20 games in his first two years with the Tigers.

LSU stagnated in 2024, however, and fired Kelly in 2025 on its way to a second straight season outside the final AP Top 25. Kelly, who has appeared to moderate his durably cantankerous public persona in recent months, seems to want to coach again; from the standpoint of putting his name back out there, a television gig is a solid place to start.

For Pederson, a return to the college ranks after decades

Doug Pederson, who hasn’t been involved with college football in decades, will be behind the mic on CFB games for CBS Sports Network this fall. | USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Connect

First things first with Pederson: he has never coached in the college ranks. He’s spent more time coaching in the high school ranks than the college ranks, putting in four years at Calvary Baptist Academy in Shreveport, La.

However, every gridiron journey has to start somewhere, and Pederson played his college ball for Louisiana-Monroe—then Northeast Louisiana—from 1987 to ‘90 (He won a Division I-AA national title in ‘87 backing up Stan Humphries, who later quarterbacked the Chargers to Super Bowl XXIX). From there, Pederson bounced around the fringes of the professional ranks before making the coaching leap in 2005.

Few remember Pederson, the player, because of the actions of Pederson, the coach, in 2017 specifically. That year, he led Philadelphia to its first Super Bowl championship, calling one of football’s most famous plays in the process. He made two other postseasons with the Eagles and one with Jacksonville, but both franchises showed him the door after four-win seasons.

Though the burial of Kelly and Pederson—and Pederson in particular—on CBS Sports Network for the bulk of their duties is curious, both should make for intriguing additions to CBS’s stable as they presumably look to get back on the sidelines in 2027.

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