You did not have to be a particularly skilled TV watcher to notice the most significant shift in the CBS Golf booth during the network’s coverage of the PGA Tour’s “West Coast Swing” — but you did have to be a persistent one.
The most noticeable shift of the 2026 golf season for CBS arrived at Pebble Beach late on Sunday evening, after winner Collin Morikawa had vanished into the bliss of his first victory on U.S. soil in nearly five years — and after Morikawa’s caddie Matt Urbanek had disappeared into the night with the 18th hole flag at Pebble Beach. It arrived 50 yards off the side of the 18th fairway, down a craggly outcropping of rocks and on a beach facing a steadily rising tide.
The shift’s name was Johnson Wagner, CBS Golf’s newest on-course reporter, who’d arrived to reprise his role as golf’s preeminent stunt-double. And as he surveyed the shot from the side of 18 that had delayed the end of the golf tournament for upwards of 20 minutes, the high-velocity hum of the CBS Golf broadcast stalled into a vacuum of anticipatory silence.
With a 50-degree wedge plucked from his bag, Wagner settled his feet, steadied his grip and swung. And with that swing, we start our look into the biggest changes on CBS in 2026 — starting with the guy whose on-course heroics have taken a new tune …
5 noticeable CBS Golf changes in 2026
5. Johnson Wagner
Wagner’s addition to the CBS Golf team is, in fact, much bigger than on-course hijinks — though he earned quite a reputation for those in his time with Golf Channel and NBC. In his day job with CBS, Wagner will be the network’s third “walking reporter,” behind ace walkers Dottie Pepper and Mark Immelman. But he will moonlight doing the kind of segments that have become a golf staple over the last several years: Leaning into his experience as a pro golfer for more than two decades to recreate the biggest shots and moments of the day himself, giving fans a deeper look into their difficulty and nuance.
Wagner and CBS are still working out the particulars of those segments and how they fit into the network’s broadcasts, but they’ve already yielded plenty of entertainment. (For example, after hitting his shot from the beach, Wagner was given thirty seconds to scale the rocks at Pebble Beach before CBS cut to a break. He made it safely with five seconds to spare.)
As the new season progresses, expect Wagner’s role to expand in kind.
4. Colt Knost moves upstairs
Colt Knost’s promotion to a spot in the CBS “super tower” precipitated Wagner’s hiring at CBS — a promotion itself precipitated by longtime analyst Ian Baker-Finch’s retirement from the CBS booth after more than two decades in TV.
Knost received the call to the bullpen to fill Baker-Finch’s seat, and though there’s no replacing Baker-Finch’s role in the CBS broadcast, Knost has already brought some of his own spin to the booth. He’ll play a vital role for CBS next to fellow analysts Frank Nobilo and Trevor Immelman, and alongside play-by-play man Jim Nantz.
