Everything to know about Jim Nantz retirement from March Madness
By Josh Hill
When the buzzer sounds on the national championship game, the curtain will drop on more than just the college basketball season.
March Madness will be over, and so will the career of the man who has voiced it for over three decades. Jim Nantz is walking away from his duties as the top announcer for the NCAA Tournament, as this marked the last Final Four he’d be the voice of.
Saying it’s the end of an era is putting it lightly, as Nantz has been a part of some of the most memorable calls in college basketball history thanks to his work over the last three decades calling Final Four games and national championships.
But all things come to an end, and Nantz has called his last big college basketball game of his career.
Jim Nantz retirement: Will he still announce NFL games?
It’s true that Nantz is dialing back his workload moving forward, and is sort of retiring from broadcasting.
More accurately, he’s retiring some aspects of his career with his duties calling March Madness games being among them. Nantz will be stepping away from College Basketball and will also be ending his tenure as the voice of The Masters, but that end date is still up in the air.
Nantz won’t, however, be giving up his duties as the lead NFL announcer at CBS any time soon.
“I’m not even close to that. I just signed a very long-term contract,” Nantz recently told Sports Illustrated in November, adding, “I’ll be doing the NFL for a long, long time with Tony [Romo].”
So while his days of calling buzzer beaters and national championships might be over, Nantz won’t be going anywhere on Sundays anytime soon.
Jim Nantz replacement: Who will take over as voice of March Madness?
With Nantz riding off into the sunset, CBS will be handing the reigns to a familiar voice to fans of March Mandess.
Ian Eagle has long been in the same tier as Kevin Harlan as a legendary non-Nantz voice, and his profile is about to get a huge boost. Eagle will be taking over for Nantz starting with next year’s Final Four and national championship game, elevating him to a status he’s worked his entire career to reach.
It’s well deserved, too. Eagle has followed the Nantz blueprint and it’s led him to the announcing promised land.
How much does Jim Nantz make?
For as legendary as he’s been, Nantz isn’t among the highest earning sports broadcasters. He ranks behind Joe Buck at ESPN, and he pales in comparison to the massive deal his own network gave Tony Romo.
Back in 2022 The New York Post reported that Nantz was negotiating a deal in the range of $10.5 million — which, for the record, is $7 million less than what Romo makes to be in the booth with him on NFL Sundays.
Before his deal with CBS needed to be re-negotiated, Nantz was reportedly making somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.5 million. Keep in mind that Tom Brady recently secured a bag north of $30 million per season to be the top color commentator for NFL on FOX, and Kirk Herbstreit makes around $16 million between his work on College Football and Amazon’s Thursday Night Football.