Nickelodeon football is back. CBS Sports announced Monday that its annual family-friendly alternate broadcast will return Saturday with special slime-filled coverage of the Wild Card Weekend playoff matchup between the Houston Texans and Los Angeles Chargers (4:30 p.m. ET).
A year after also hosting an alternate presentation of Super Bowl LVIII, Nickelodeon is set to transport viewers back to SpongeBob SquarePants' home of Bikini Bottom, featuring augmented reality and cameos by a wide range of Paramount characters, including SpongeBob and Patrick Star, Dora the Explorer, Sonic the Hedgehog, Wanda and Cosmo from "The Fairy OddParents," and a "PAW Patrol"-themed virtual blimp.
"CBS Mornings" co-host and "The NFL Today" analyst Nate Burleson will once again headline coverage from the broadcast booth, alongside Dylan Schefter (sideline reporter) and Sandy Cheeks from "SpongeBob."
"I can't give you all the sauce, but listen, there's going to be a bunch of new additions to our coverage," Burleson told CBSSports.com Monday. "We got everybody from Bikini Bottom. We'll have some Transformers. I'm a big 'Rugrats' fan. I'm 43, but I kind of caught the tail end of 'Rugrats,' and I hear some of the Rugrats are gonna pull up. And then we'll have some other surprise classic characters from the Nickelodeon universe. Marvel's got their universe. DC's got their universe. So why not Nickelodeon? So this is going to be a Nickelodeon universe wild-card game, and I'll be in the booth as a fan and as a play-by-play guy."
This special alternate broadcast will air alongside CBS Sports' traditional broadcast of the game on CBS (and streaming on Paramount+), which kicks off at 4:30 p.m. ET to open the Wild Card Weekend slate.