Charles Barkley and Ernie Johnson of Inside the NBA
Credit: The Steam Room Podcast
We’re six weeks out from the start of another NBA season, and the annual ritual of Charles Barkley retirement watch has already produced its first wrinkle.
Barkley declared earlier this month on The Bill Simmons Podcast that this season would be his last on Inside the NBA — and that it would be Ernie Johnson’s last, too. But according to new reporting from Front Office Sports, Johnson’s decision about his own future remains unresolved, which would seem to contradict the picture Barkley already painted.
Charles Barkley said recently on Bill Simmons pod that Ernie Johnson had plans to retire after this season.
A source told @FOS that Johnson’s decision is still up in the air.
— Ryan Glasspiegel (@sportsrapport) September 15, 2026
“Me and Ernie are a package deal,” Barkley said on the podcast. “So right now, unless Ernie changes his mind, next year is my last year 100 percent.”
Before Barkley’s comments, it was not publicly known that Johnson, 70, was even contemplating retirement. In Barkley’s telling, the notion originated from a pitch Johnson made to him after ESPN acquired the rights to Inside. Johnson has scaled back his MLB postseason duties and pared down his March Madness hosting load in recent years, but he had never disclosed retirement plans — at least publicly — before Barkley volunteered them on someone else’s podcast.
But Barkley has teased retirement every offseason for several years now, often as part of what looked like a public negotiating tactic for a new contract. Nearly a decade ago, he staged a very public declaration of his intent to retire at 60, when his previous contract expired.
“I told TNT I was going to retire at 60. And they were like, ‘Oh, he’s full of sh*t. He’s not gonna retire,'” Barkley recalled.
“So we come up, I said, ‘Hey guys, it’s my last year.’ They’re like, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘I told y’all six years ago I was gonna retire at 60.’ They’re like, ‘You were serious?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I was serious.’ Then they said to me, ‘Do us a favor. Stay two more years, ’til we get the new deal.’ I talked it over with my friends. I said, ‘OK, I’ll tell you what. I’ll stay ’til 62,’ which was last year … little did I know these f*cking idiots was gonna lose the NBA.”
Barkley said he was ready to hand his chair to a frequent fill-in panelist like Jalen Rose or Jamal Crawford, but TNT resisted letting him go while it was negotiating a new broadcast deal with the league. So in 2022, Barkley agreed to stay on, only for TNT to lose its package to Prime Video anyway. He teased retirement again in 2024, invoking a contract clause that would’ve let him walk once TNT lost game rights, but ultimately reversed course and stayed put.
Once it became clear TNT would no longer air NBA games, Barkley said he met with both NBC and Amazon about jumping ship. NBC reportedly offered him a lucrative raise, which he ultimately turned down.
“I could have gone to NBC and made more money if I was concerned about money,” he told Simmons. “NBC offered me more money than I was making at Turner.”
Barkley’s own exit has been declared, walked back, and re-declared often enough that nobody takes his word at face value anymore — and now it appears he may have spoken for Johnson prematurely, too. Still, if Johnson does ultimately walk away, it could amount to a fittingly symmetrical exit for both him and Inside as a whole.
ESPN currently licenses the show from TNT, and neither side has publicly detailed how long that arrangement runs. Kenny Smith has already signed a side deal to appear on other ESPN programming. Could ESPN eventually look to take the show over entirely? How might Warner Bros. Discovery’s looming sale to Paramount Skydance reshape TNT Sports’ appetite for the current setup? And what happens to TNT’s substantial Big 12 inventory — acquired as part of the original trade that sent Inside’s rights to ESPN — if that arrangement ever unwinds?
Barkley, for his part, has said the main reason he stuck around through the move to ESPN was to protect the show’s longtime staff and ease the transition. Whether that mission is actually finished — or whether Johnson is finished, for that matter — appears to still be an open question, Barkley’s confident declaration on The Bill Simmons Podcast notwithstanding.