Amanda Balionis’ 2025 was packed. After covering almost 19 weeks of the PGA Tour, including the Masters and the PGA Championship, she stepped to the other side in the fall. From September, her new role at the NFL resumed. For nearly a decade now, Balionis has lived like this, in the margins of the two sports. And now, as the 2025 NFL season came to a close, she has finally said out loud the truth.

Posting a ‘sappy’ post on her Instagram story, Amanda Balionis unhesitatingly declared her love for football. “Football will always be my first love, and to get to cover the NFL is a dream.”

This post visibly sidetracked golf, which has defined much of her public broadcasting identity. But for Balionis, it was a love letter to a profession she had always envisioned. Working with a team that was equally hardworking as hers, kind and incredible, the CBS reporter called herself “a whole different level of lucky.”

“This crew is truly a team. I’ll miss our Friday night dinners and Saturday night production meetings,” she further continues, naming names like Tom McCarthy and his stories, Ross Tucker and his antics, and Logan Ryan. Indeed, a dream come true, and we golf fans can’t really blame her for it.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, football for Balionis was a way of life. Her Sundays revolved around the Steelers, and her earliest memories hold a tinge of the NFL. Watching Bonnie Bernstein report on the NFL sidelines was when she decided that football was where she saw herself. But that opportunity took its sweet time to come.

In the early 2010s, hustling through New York City, Amanda Balionis worked seven days a week as a freelancer. She was living in a 300-sq-foot apartment, and ends were difficult to meet. It was then that she was offered a PGA Tour in-house reporter position. Forced by necessity, she took it, and her life changed.

For the next six years (2011-16), the 39-year-old did that job. She had grown up on a golf course, her parents playing the sport several days a week. Success was bound to come. But of course, it came at a cost. As she gained fame on the course, the male-dominated media empire labeled her “the golf girl.” In 2016, she moved to Callaway Golf, but she couldn’t come out of this box.

It was a year after that when she finally got her breakthrough. In 2017, CBS Sports took a bet on her and hired Amanda Balionis as a part-time golf reporter. In 2018, realizing her potential, CBS promoted her to a full-time job and added college football and select NFL games to her list of duties. Then she went on to cover her first Super Bowl: Eagles vs Patriots. The first person to find her afterwards was Jim Nantz.

“He said you are a part of this team,” she told Sports Broadcast Journal in 2021. “I’m not saying you always need validation, but imagine having arguably the best ever tell you that you fit in after I’ve been told that I wasn’t good enough.”

Since then, her dual-sport role has only refined. While golf does demand constant travel across continents, the NFL is no less demanding, with its own week-long commitments—from meetings and coaching sessions to game day, plus three-plus hours of pregame preparation. Last year, Balionis managed all this while recovering from a herniated disc and pinched nerve that had been causing her pain throughout the season.

By December, she needed rest, something she feels she has earned. That’s how her year finally ended (also with a breakup). And now with the NFL season finally over, Amanda Balionis can take a much-needed break before she grills herself again.

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More golf in 2026?

After an exhausting 2025, the new year for Amanda Balionis will noticeably lean towards golf. This comes as part of several changes undertaken by CBS Sports.

Her timeline sits somewhere in the 12-18 event range. That’s a step down from the 20+ tournaments she covered last year.

Moreover, changes at CBS have also led to changes in her role. Balionis will no longer be a walking reporter. Instead, she becomes CBS’s primary high-impact interviewer. Her focus will lie on post-round and post-tournament moments. This will eventually lead to a fall in her travel.

After suffering immense exhaustion, Balionis had decided to reduce the workload on herself. CBS is still betting on her because of the hike in viewership it saw last year – a 17% increase from 2024. Much of the credit goes to Amanda Balionis, and in this new year, she hopes to maintain that.