The post An NFL-favorite TV toy is making its way to the Open Championship appeared first on Golf.

The post An NFL-favorite TV toy is making its way to the Open Championship appeared first on Golf.

But hoisted between a tangle of black wires above the 18th grandstand rests the place of greatest consequence at this year’s Open Championship: a small, remote-operated camera attached to a rotating jib. This is the Open Championship’s newest (and greatest) golf TV innovation: The Spidercam.

On Monday afternoon, the R&A announced the 18th hole at Royal Portrush would be equipped with the Spidercam — a mobile TV camera that promises to alter the way tens of millions of golf fans view the action from the most consequential hole at this year’s final major. The camera will sit suspended above the 18th green at Royal Portrush, attached to a four-point cable system that allows it to rove between various locations to showcase new angles of the undulations and shots into the hole. This is believed to be the first time the technology will be utilized for a golf broadcast anywhere in the world.

American football fans will be familiar with the technology when they see it during NBC’s coverage this week. The Spidercam is synonymous with the NFL’s uber-popular “SkyCam,” which provides a down-the-line and overhead view of the action from NFL games similar to the one utilized by the Madden video game series. Several years ago, the technology saw a surge in popularity after a foggy Super Bowl rematch between the New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons necessitated the camera’s usage on Sunday Night Football. Fans enjoyed the camera so much that NBC aired an entire Thursday Night Football game utilizing the SkyCam later in the season, and the camera became a regular fixture of NFL broadcasts in the years that followed.

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“We have worked closely with European Tour Productions and their production partners IMG to invest in cutting-edge broadcast technology and believe that Spidercam will bring millions of fans a new perspective of the action from Royal Portrush with incredible detail and accessibility wherever they are in the world,” Neil Armit, the R&A’s chief commercial officer, said in a release announcing the news.

On Tuesday morning in Portrush, camera crews working for the production company responsible for the Open TV broadcast, European Tour Productions, could be spotted fiddling with the camera as practice round players cycled through the 18th green. The camera zipped from location to location at impressive speed, providing minimal overhead distraction as it cycled through various camera shots.

The hope, for both the R&A and the Open’s American broadcast partners at NBC, is that the new camera angle will give fans an added dose of perspective about golf’s final major championship. Unlike most of golf’s other major championship hosts, it can be difficult even for experienced camera crews to grasp the full subtlety of links golf courses, which traditionally rely upon making use of a rolling dunescape littered with pot bunkers rather than defined landforms like water, sand and trees.

“Alongside our production partners IMG, we have a shared vision with the R&A to use the latest technologies to create a truly immersive experience for the millions of fans watching the global broadcast,” Richard Bunn, chief content and revenue officer at the European Tour Group, said in the same release. “With new innovations such as Spidercam being rolled out this year, the 153rd Open will get fans closer to the action than ever before.”

All four days of this year’s Open Championship will be available on NBC, with 43 hours of nationally televised coverage expected over the four days from Royal Portrush. That coverage will culminate with the so-called “greatest walk in golf” — the final-round leader’s charge up the 18th fairway at the Open Championship.

If you enjoy the view of that walk more than usual in 2025, you’ll know which camera to thank.

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The post Kevin Kisner saw the future on J.J Spaun’s U.S. Open-winning moment appeared first on Golf.

The post Kevin Kisner saw the future on J.J Spaun’s U.S. Open-winning moment appeared first on Golf.

It was also, it turns out, something else: Predictable.

In a video released by the USGA on Tuesday morning, golf fans earned a glimpse into the NBC Sports booth as Spaun’s 60-footer to win his first-career major championship found the bottom of the hole at Oakmont. While the most memorable piece of the video occurs shortly after Spaun’s putt fell — Hicks’ instant-classic “How about ONE?!” call — the most compelling piece of the video occurs shortly before.

That’s when NBC Sports lead analyst Kevin Kisner turned to his broadcast partner like Nostradamus, flipping a thumbs-up to Hicks 15 feet before the putt had reached the bottom of the hole.

“I’d seen that putt probably 10 times throughout the day,” Kisner told hosts Smylie Kaufman and Charlie Hulme in an interview on Kaufman’s The Smylie Show podcast. “Most guys were getting it within four or five feet — it wasn’t like it was impossible to get to a makeable second — so I could kind of tell when it crested the ridge whether the speed was good or not.”

Kisner said his thumbs-up was more about the pace of Spaun’s putt than it was a prediction about the putt’s outcome. Kisner wanted Hicks to know the putt was good pace … and wanted to give Hicks the opportunity to prepare for the possibility that it might be really good.

“Dan is kind of leading as it’s rolling, [saying Spaun] needs a two-putt to win the U.S. Open. As it crested the hill I’m like, ‘oh, man, this is perfect speed,’ like, it’s a two-putt,” Kisner said. “I just stick my thumb up right in front of Dan’s face, [as if to say] it’s good, because I know he’s got to make some crazy, big moment right there if the putt does something good.”

“None of us, nobody in that booth, was thinking [it would fall], right?” Kisner said. “You’re not thinking it. No one in America is thinking it. So I’m like, What is Dan gonna say if it goes in? I thought that was the coolest call ever.”

The great irony of Kisner’s prediction? His partner in the booth, Hicks, never saw it.

“I don’t think I did,” Hicks told Kaufman with a laugh. “I can’t imagine why. I was locked in on the monitor and just making sure I didn’t screw this epic U.S. Open moment up. But afterwards, I do remember Kiz saying, ‘Man, I knew that.'”

“I did not see the thumbs up, Kiz,” Hicks said, laughing again. “That’ll be enough of you for now. Let me do the call.”

To hear Kiz and Hicks’ full interview after the U.S. Open with Kaufman, you can check out the link here.

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The post NBC chief speaks: LIV a ‘total sideshow,’ NBC’s golf future, spinoff plans appeared first on Golf.

The post NBC chief speaks: LIV a ‘total sideshow,’ NBC’s golf future, spinoff plans appeared first on Golf.

Flood’s employers set up shop in the building in 2012, turning its collection of sharp angles and cavernous ceilings — the remnants of an old Clairol shampoo factory — into a $100 million moonlighting as the global headquarters of NBC Sports. Up high, industrial air ducts and vents poke through the walls, as if to fumigate the scent of some long-forgotten batch of Herbal Essences. Lower, great glass windows encase every corner of the building in a translucent sheen, forcing streaks of sunlight into the otherwise sanitized interiors.

It is perhaps fitting that Flood’s office sits between glass on either side: The back windowpane separating him from the outdoors, and the front separating him from the indoors. As the seventh executive producer and president of production at NBC Sports, it is his job to be the intermediary between the real world and NBC — helping his talented army of producers and on-air talent bring sports broadcasts to life, and helping his network choose sports properties with the cultural cache and popularity to deliver big audiences (and big profits).

Flood oversees all of NBC’s sports properties (outside of the Olympics, which are looked after by fellow EP Molly Solomon). His portfolio spans from Sunday Night Football to the Tour de France, and will cost NBC north of $6 billion in 2025 alone, more than $400 million of which will be paid to golf partners at the PGA Tour, USGA, R&A and PGA of America. The work requires Flood to enter each day with eyes wide open, understanding a rapidly changing sports media world with a considerable financial arsenal and little margin for error. It also occasionally requires him to make hard decisions against the desires of the talented people surrounding him, like in 2020, when Flood’s NBC parted with his first and deepest sports love, the NHL, ending a years long relationship between the two parties that had helped to make Flood’s career.

Major golf changes

I visited Flood in his large glass office in early June with the hopes of understanding another tricky situation: NBC Golf. When Flood took over the golf unit in early 2023, the NBC Golf brand was at a crossroads, falling behind CBS’s recently revamped production and regularly eliciting the ire of fans worn out by commercial inventory and creative stagnation. Two years of shake-ups followed, including several key decisions initiated by Flood: Moving on from analysts Roger Maltbie, Gary Koch and Paul Azinger (the latter described Flood as ‘a real a–hole‘ on the way out); dreaming up a new vision in which broadcasters were divided by ‘odd’ and ‘even’ hole numbers; and admitting NBC “strategically shifted” money away from smaller PGA Tour events in order to blow out coverage from the biggest ones.

As the calendar turned toward the U.S. Open at Oakmont, Flood’s vision for golf on NBC had quietly started to take shape. A juiced-up broadcast from the U.S. Women’s Open earned largely positive reviews, and the NBC on-air team was fully staffed for the first time since Azinger’s absence (with Koch and Maltbie returning to pinch-hit at the biggest NBC events). In big moments at the U.S. Women’s Open and the Players, lead producer Tommy Roy delivered highly compelling stories with a distinctly premium feel.

But behind the scenes, the questions facing NBC were only growing larger. Sure, the network no longer had to worry about Dan Hicks’ contract or a lead analyst vacancy — Flood extended Hicks and hired Kevin Kisner after a strong FedEx Cup Playoff run in the booth, navigating an unusual agreement that will see the golfer play out the string of his PGA Tour career while also working at NBC. But those concerns had been replaced by larger ones: The future of the USGA on NBC, topsy turvy golf TV viewership, LIV, the TV mechanics of a still-changing PGA Tour, and a spinoff from Golf Channel that will see the cable network fall under the ownership of a new publicly traded company named Versant.

All of it raised an important question for the man in charge of NBC Sports’ portfolio: With a $2.5 billion per-year deal with the NBA set to kick in shortly and an off-ramp with the USGA and PGA Tour suddenly within view, where does golf fall on NBC’s priority list?

What is NBC’s golf future? And how does LIV fit?

“We feel a lot better than we did a year ago,” Flood said. “Everyone feels a lot better than they did a year ago, because golf is heading in a much better direction. I think we’ve had really good results, good tournaments, good drama. Now we just need a great U.S. Open, and roll that right into a great Open Championship, and we’ll be smiling all the way to the bank.”

It was hardly unusual to hear Flood project confidence about the state of NBC’s golf portfolio — a year ago he suggested that he might keep rolling without a lead analyst in perpetum if a star candidate didn’t differentiate themself — but his sense of exuberance was different from 2024 in one key way. Back then, he was talking about the state of NBC Golf — today he was talking about the state of golf, lower-case G.

2024 was a year of uncertainty in pro golf, with PGA Tour telecasts seeing 15 percent audience dips from the previous year as LIV’s resultant upheaval reached its peak. Comparatively, 2025 has been a year of calmer waters: Ratings have rebounded, title-sponsors are jumping aboard, and the PGA Tour seems to have finally settled into a repeatable format. Equally important, in Flood’s eyes, is another fact: LIV’s early momentum is dead.

“The LIV stuff is almost a total sideshow,” Flood said. “The reality is, their opportunity was when the tournament happened in Doral [LIV Miami], and they had every name on the leaderboard and no one paid attention.”

According to a recent GOLF.com analysis, LIV Miami drew 603,000 average viewers in Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel, the biggest audience for the league to date. But minute-by-minute viewership trends from that event showed fewer viewers tuned in as the afternoon wore on, while NBC’s Valero Texas Open delivered 2.2 million average viewers, and peaked at more than 4 million for the tournament’s conclusion.

“Yeah,” Flood said. “That to me said [the LIV] product is not relevant in this country.”

News

What’s next for the USGA? Did TV stop a match play Tour Championship?

Other than LIV, the health of lower-case G golf is an important distinction for Flood. He has been heavily involved in the PGA Tour’s efforts to improve golf as an entertainment entity, including a larger attempt to transition the Tour Championship into a match play event that did not survive the Tour’s policy board. Flood elected not to speak on theoretical changes to the Tour, but pushed back against the suggestion that TV concerns killed the momentum for a match play championship. The reality, he said, was quite the opposite.

“There’s no question match play would work for the PGA Tour playoffs,” Flood said. “It would be dramatic for TV, and if it was done the right way, it could be one of the great moments in golf.”

While we are left to speculate about what might have been, there is much more pressing uncertainty involving NBC’s involvement in this week’s championship, the U.S. Open. In the spring, NBC and the USGA failed to come to an agreement on a rights deal extension during an exclusive negotiating window — a decision that effectively chummed the waters for competitors like ESPN, a long-rumored USGA courter, to enter negotiations. Should NBC lose the USGA when the deal expires in 2026, the network would have ample reason to walk away from golf altogether in 2027, around the time the PGA Tour is expected to begin negotiating its next round of TV rights (and after the spinoff of Golf Channel is completed). As he looked into his crystal ball, though, Flood didn’t seem interested in that outcome.

“We saw what happened when the USGA came back to NBC [after a short-lived stint on FOX] — we saw how the USGA got elevated again to where it belongs as the premier events involved,” Flood said. “That’s what our company’s about, and that’s what our production team does. The business side is, I’m in the fun side of the business. The business guys can do the business, but from production perspective, we know we make everything we touch better.”

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Golf Channel’s spinoff future

A complicating factor in the USGA negotiations are cable networks like Golf Channel and USA Network, which will be spun off from NBC into a new company named Versant in the fall. Traditionally, the USGA has preferred its championships aired on large cable and broadcast networks — airtime that will no longer be available to NBC to negotiate with once the spinoff is complete. (Viewer attitudes have warmed towards streaming-exclusive telecasts in 2025, though it’s unclear if the USGA agrees.)

Flood said that the shift in Golf Channel ownership won’t preclude Golf Channel from working alongside NBC, though there is no longer any direct financial incentive to work together. The two networks will share on-air talent at least in the first years of Golf Channel’s new ownership group, and much of the coverage should keep its current look and feel.

“I think, as a viewer, people really won’t know the difference,” Flood said. “On a day to day basis, it really is going to be sleeves off a vest. No one’s going to notice. It’s really a back room business change. It’s all going to happen the same way, it’s just how the shekels are divided up.”

There is a lot to learn about the eventual shape of the new Golf Channel. Several industry sources have suggested the spinoff is largely about restructuring Comcast’s business and debt to prepare for the streaming age, and less about cleaving the businesses in two. The arrangement will allow Comcast to clear debt and focus more energy on growth opportunities in the media space, while allowing Versant a runway to manage the decline of several (still highly profitable) cable networks. Comcast shareholders, meanwhile, will receive proportional holdings in the new venture. In theory, if the spinoff is managed well, it will make 1 plus 1 equal 3 — generating more market value for the separated entities than when they were combined.

A smaller, leaner NBC (at least in the golf world) could have an interesting effect on its broadcasts, perhaps allowing the network to operate a more bespoke model, like CBS’s golf coverage, and less of the corporate-behemoth vision that has highlighted the last several years. In either case, Golf Channel’s continued financial success is vital for the rest of the PGA Tour’s TV partners, who rely on the cable channel for Thursday and Friday tournament coverage and all manner of other golf-related programming.

Flood pointed to his longtime NBC Sports counterpart (and golf fan) Mark Lazarus — who will be Versant’s chief executive and is one of many NBC lifers joining the new spinoff — as a sign of the expected synergy between the two brands and optimism for Golf Channel’s future.

Another, he said, is their home address. Golf Channel will stay in the NBC Sports building through at least the end of 2026, meaning Sam Flood will have the chance to keep a watchful eye.

On both sides of the glass office, you can rest assured he will.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.

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The post PGA Tour launches new ‘smart tracer’ technology on TV broadcasts appeared first on Golf.

The post PGA Tour launches new ‘smart tracer’ technology on TV broadcasts appeared first on Golf.

On Thursday at the RBC Canadian Open, the Tour debuted a brand-new shot tracer on its telecasts it is calling “smart tracer” — an on-screen graphic that changes in color while shots are in the air based upon the ball’s most likely outcome.

The smart tracer will serve as an addition to the Tour’s popular “drone tracer” technology, which tracks shots in the air utilizing a moving drone camera. The drone tracer is fresh off an Emmy victory, and you can think of the smart tracer as an enhancement to the preexisting tech rather than a replacement for it, giving a viewers a deeper glimpse into the outcome of shots as they are unfolding in real-time.

The Tour’s broadcast partners — CBS, NBC and Golf Channel — have experimented increasingly with probability-based visual graphics in recent years, leaning into the Tour’s AWS partnership and the expansion of artificial intelligence to chart probabilities down to the hundred-millisecond.

In previous iterations of the technology, viewers have witnessed a shrinking “landing area” graphic as the ball has closed in on its destination. The smart tracer will differ from these prior experiments by providing colors associated with a shot’s outcome: green for a shot in the fairway, red for not in the fairway, and blue before a probability can be determined. According to the Tour, the new tracer will start populating roughly 1.2 seconds after impact, and will be updated every hundred milliseconds until the ball has landed. You can check out a video of it in action below.

Some viewers have argued against these enhancements, arguing they remove some of the anticipation between shot-and-outcome that makes for compelling golf viewing. Tracer technology, however, has been one of the most ubiquitously appreciated developments in the last two decades of golf on TV — coloring in everything from Rory McIlroy’s unthinkable wedge into the water on the 13th at the Masters to McIlroy’s equally unthinkable iron shot into the 15th green to set up a grand-slam-altering birdie.

The Tour says the new tracers come as part of the rollout surrounding its Fan Forward Initiative, a massive survey of golf fans that has helped to inform many of the tweaks surrounding telecasts and fan experience in 2025. In addition to the smart tracer, Tour telecasts have experimented with cutline-oriented Friday broadcasts, alternative shot-sequences and fewer tap-in putts.

The smart tracer tech will be utilized throughout the weekend at the RBC Canadian Open and in a handful of Tour events for the remainder of the season: the Rocket Classic, Travelers Championship and each of the FedEx Cup Playoff events.

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The post This Emmy-winning TV tech will delight U.S. Women’s Open fans appeared first on Golf.

The post This Emmy-winning TV tech will delight U.S. Women’s Open fans appeared first on Golf.

The U.S. Women’s Open is to women’s golf what the Oscars are to awards season — or perhaps, more accurately, what the Masters is to the men’s game: the biggest week of the year in terms of buzz and eyeballs.

Some of the reasons for U.S. Women’s Open’s spotlight are literal. The championship will have a larger audience than any other because it will be presented to a larger audience than any other. The U.S. Women’s Open will air on network TV for more hours over the coming four days than any other women’s golf event, as USGA commissioner Mike Whan pointed out on Tuesday.

“There’s just virtually nothing else like it in the women’s game,” Whan said in his annual state-of-the-state from Erin Hills. “There’s more network hours on this championship than anything else that they’ll play in as a championship this year.”

NBC will carry eight hours of tournament coverage from the weekend, bringing a premium feel to the telecast of what is, in all other ways, a premium event. Even better news for fans watching at home? NBC won’t be skimping on one of the most important (and well-received) goodies of its typical golf TV production.

For the first time in the history of women’s golf, the U.S. Women’s Open will carry the PGA Tour, NBC and CBS’s Emmy-winning innovation, the Drone Tracer.

The Drone Tracer first made its debut on CBS during the 2024 season and, at the time of its launch, was believed to be golf’s first-ever “moving” tracer. The tech allows a drone operator on the ground to move the camera in the air while a tracer forms on the screen, providing a smooth, simultaneous movement that gives viewers a deeper grasp of the angle and difficulty of the shot. (You can watch a video of the tech in action below.)

The technology has blossomed into one of the most relied-upon components of live golf TV in the year since its debut on CBS. (LIV also experimented with drone tracers in 2023 and early 2024, though their drones remained stationary in the air.)

Now, the aerial tech will be making its way to the women’s golf scene for the first time — and not a moment too soon. Erin Hills is a golf colossus in its size and scale, making it the perfect golf course to debut a tracer that helps to bring both of those elements into sharper focus.

Golf fans will be able to watch the tracer in action during the Peacock’s coverage from the USWO, which will air on USA Network from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, and on NBC from 2-5 p.m. on Saturday and from 1-6 p.m. on Sunday.

The post This Emmy-winning TV tech will delight U.S. Women’s Open fans appeared first on Golf.

The post Al Michaels’ 1-word text to Jim Nantz perfectly captured Rory McIlroy’s Masters appeared first on Golf.

The post Al Michaels’ 1-word text to Jim Nantz perfectly captured Rory McIlroy’s Masters appeared first on Golf.

Up until several years ago, Michaels held the title of the voice of American sports, having called everything from the Super Bowl to the Miracle on Ice with his distinct blend of avuncular wit and genuine fascination. When Michaels stepped down from NBC to join Amazon’s Thursday Night Football coverage, he handed the baton to Nantz, whose more syrupy style of calling the NFL, NCAA and pro golf replaced Michaels’ “Fun Uncle” schtick with a “Voice of God” sensibility.

These differences are minor. Both broadcasters share a unique gift for narrating the greatest moments in American sports with perfect pitch. They also share another similarity: a love affair with the Masters.

Michaels never had the opportunity to call golf’s first major, which CBS has broadcast for the last seven decades. Nantz has been on the call for 40 years. But in an appearance on the Rich Eisen Show on Monday, Nantz admitted that Michaels is a keen viewer of the happenings at Augusta National.

“Our good friend Al Michaels is a huge Masters follower and fan,” Nantz told Eisen. “He writes me after these Masters telecasts when they’re really good [like this year’s was], and he says, ‘There’s no sporting event like it. There’s nothing in terms of television coverage that can compare.'”

Of course, this year’s Masters TV coverage proved particularly memorable. Not only did CBS’s cameras capture Rory McIlroy’s thrilling Grand Slam victory in real-time, they also did so with an artist’s touch, with director Steve Milton leading a telecast that produced some of the event’s most enduring images, like the entirety of McIlroy’s teary six-minute walk from the 18th green to the scoring room.

Michaels was watching with an expert eye. In his decades working on some of the sports world’s most prominent broadcast teams, he learned what it takes to turn a remarkable moment into an iconic image — and he knew McIlroy’s victory was much more than a moment.

“He called it ‘cinema’,” Nantz said. “It’s cinematic.”

In his interview with Eisen, Nantz admitted he was touched by Michaels’ sentiment.

Features

“I think that’s the way we all try to approach it,” he said. “We keep our words to a minimum, and we hope they have punch and power. We try to let this thing have the air and the space and the breath that it needs to play all the shots. We have that wonderful melody and undercurrent, the Augusta theme. It adds up almost like a dream sequence disguised as a sporting event.”

Indeed, McIlroy’s final round at Augusta National was every bit a dream sequence. Even Nantz’s final call — “The long journey is over … McIlroy has his masterpiece!” — spoke to the essential disbelief at the center of McIlroy’s Masters moment.

That, Nantz says, is the secret sauce that makes the Masters: cinema. Sports are much more than the sum of their parts, as Michaels and Nantz know well. At their best, our favorite games come to represent something much larger. And at the Masters, well, everything feels bigger.

“It’s my favorite event,” Nantz said. “I’ve been asked that question for years, and it’s always a tough thing to [give the perception of] slighting something else, but there’s nothing quite like that. And when you combine it with a story as big as Rory going for the career Grand Slam and the crazy odyssey/journey he took to close it all out? It was pure magic, man. I appreciate it a month later that we’re still talking about it. Everywhere I go I hear about it multiple times. Golf fans and non-golf fans were touched by what they saw that day.”

To hear the entirety of Nantz’s interview with Eisen, you can check out the link below — and to read more about Nantz’s Masters history, you can check out GOLF’s profile of the man here.

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The post PGA Tour and LIV Golf TV ratings reveal striking audience data appeared first on Golf.

The post PGA Tour and LIV Golf TV ratings reveal striking audience data appeared first on Golf.

The problem is that there isn’t a clean definition for how “momentum” looks. Is it locking down sponsors? Delivering big crowds? Social media engagement?

For better or worse, TV audience data is the best way to know how golf’s tours are performing in the real world — and in this week’s Hot Mic newsletter, we’ve got a treasure trove of it ready for your consumption.

Below is a collection of Nielsen ratings data for LIV and the PGA Tour on seven head-to-head weeks through the first part of 2025, giving us a clear view into how the landscape between the two major tours has changed at the halfway point of the 2025 season.

(P.S. – You’re reading the Hot Mic Newsletter a day later. If you’d like to receive it straight to your inbox first, subscribe here.)

Editor’s Note:

All the information you’re about to read comes from the Nielsen Big Data + Panel, which is slightly different from the traditional Nielsen audience averages you’ll see on social media.

All Nielsen data is a representative sample. Traditional audience averages are calculated using a device attached to TVs in 42,000 households. Big Data incorporates those 42,000 households with data from 45 million “digital devices” like Smart TVs. Both numbers track the same measurement — average audience — but they go about it slightly differently.

In theory, the larger sample size means that the Big Data + Panel gives a more accurate picture of sports TV audiences. In practice, Big Data numbers tend to skew slightly larger than traditional average audience metrics.

We feel okay reporting this information because the data is consistent and accurate across the entire dataset, and because the Big Data + Panel is generally accepted within the industry as accurate and consistent. It is the expectation from many within the sports TV industry that Big Data will soon replace Nielsen’s traditional averages as the so-called “currency” of TV ratings. If you’d like to read more about ratings methodology, you can click the link here.

THE HEADLINES

Through SEVEN head-to-head Sundays, the audience difference between golf’s two main tours is clear. On Sundays in which the two tours have held events in 2025, the PGA Tour is averaging 3.1 million average viewers on CBS/NBC, while LIV is averaging 175,000 on FOX/FS1/FS2.

That means the Tour’s final-round TV audiences on the two major networks (excluding Golf Channel) are, on average, 17.78 times as large as LIV’s final-round TV audiences when the two products are head-to-head.

For a cross-sport comparison, that’s about the difference between the NBA’s mammoth opening-night coverage on TNT (3 million average viewers) and late-January’s Sharks-Kraken game, which was ESPN’s lowest-rated NHL telecast of the 2025 season (175k). To get a better glimpse of how that looks, check out the handy chart I made below.

BEST-CASE SCENARIO

Things get a little better for LIV if we extrapolate the data. LIV airs the vast majority of its tournament rounds on FS1 and FS2, a pair of cable of networks that attract smaller audiences than national over-the-air networks. The upstarts have averaged 475,000 average viewers in two Sunday telecasts on FOX, the national, over-the-air broadcast network, compared with just 63,000 average viewers in five Sunday telecasts on FS1.

If we compare the Tour’s final-round averages on CBS/NBC to LIV’s final-round averages on FOX, the Tour’s broadcasts are 6.52 times as large as LIV’s — still a big victory for the Tour, but by a smaller margin than data inclusive of FS1/FS2.

This point underscores the importance of the structure of LIV’s deal with Fox Sports. A greater number of events on the FOX broadcast channel — the league will have only five of 14 events on the main FOX network — could help the league’s popularity. It also points to the challenge of LIV’s international schedule: With so many events taking place overseas and airing overnight in the U.S., it is hard to deliver consistently big ratings or the kind of schedule reliability that viewers crave.

Of course, FS1 is hardly a desert for sports TV ratings. FS1 has regularly delivered average audiences in the millions for football and basketball games. The difference is that those sports can generally attract viewership on any network, while smaller/less established leagues generally lean on big networks to help attract big viewership.

GOLF CHANNEL

Golf Channel gives us a glimpse into the battle between the PGA Tour and LIV unfolding on cable. During LIV’s North American events — the closest comparison for the two sides given LIV’s schedule — Golf Channel’s PGA Tour lead-ins are drawing 506,000 average viewers, while LIV is drawing 101,000 average viewers on FS1/FS2. That means the PGA Tour’s cable lead-in draws five times the audience as LIV’s full-length cable (FS1/FS2) telecasts, roughly in line with the Tour’s lead over LIV when comparing broadcast networks.

Down-to-the-minute data

PEAKS AND VALLEYS

Average viewership is the measurement of the average viewers per minute, but golf telecasts have another important metric: Peak viewership, or the number of people watching during a broadcast’s most-watched moment.

If a golf telecast is performing the way it should, the audience graph will look a bit like the S&P 500 during a bull run: Consistently rising as time moves on. The “peak” of the graph should come right around the completion of the final round, as a tournament’s most dramatic moment occurs and a champion is crowned.

While average audience is the currency of TV ratings, peak audience is also important to the finances of golf TV. Some tournaments will sell advertising based upon the hour, with some advertisers paying specifically for final-hour spots in the hopes of reaching the largest possible audience.

STRANGENESS

It is odd, then, to see the minute-by-minute data for LIV Miami, the most-watched LIV broadcast to date. The peak audience from that telecast on FOX came at 2:12 p.m., an hour into the network’s five-hour broadcast window, before dropping off for the remaining four hours.

While any number of reasons can impact a telecast’s viewership, one theory behind Miami’s early peak and subsequent decline is that LIV lost viewers to the PGA Tour. On the Miami Sunday, LIV’s peak came just minutes before NBC’s telecast from the Valero Texas Open went live, and its audience dipped by 18 percent in the three hours after NBC went to air.

The minute-by-minute data takes on a more traditional shape for LIV Mexico City on FS1, with a smaller (but still noticeable) peak at the conclusion. Still, that telecast (137,000 average viewers) was one-third the size of Miami’s.

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ON THE OTHER HAND

In the broadcast windows opposite LIV’s North American events in Miami and Mexico City, the PGA Tour’s minute-by-minute charts multiplied sharply as the tournament reached its conclusion.

At the Valero Texas Open, which ran counter to LIV Miami on FOX, the audience jumped from less than a million at the telecast’s 2:30 p.m. start to more than 4 million at its 5:54 p.m. peak.

In that Valero Texas Open telecast — the clearest TV battle between LIV and the PGA Tour to date — 3.4 million average viewers tuned into the 45-minute stretch from 5:15-6 p.m. resulting in Brian Harman’s victory — a 54.5 percent increase over the day’s average of 2.2 million. During LIV Miami’s closing stretch that afternoon from 2:30-5 p.m., 570,000 average viewers tuned in, less than the day’s average of 603,000.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.

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The post ESPN borrows NBC broadcaster experiment for PGA Championship appeared first on Golf.

DUUUUVAL

Availability isn’t a concern for former players turned broadcasters in most sports. In fact, the problem with most ex-pros is too much free time, not the absence of it.

The opposite is true in golf, where players can compete well into their 50s and where a whole tour exists for those good enough to have golf TV pedigree, the Champions Tour.

This week, that phenomenon will prove a challenge for ESPN, which will start a bullpen game in the lead analyst chair instead of longtime lead analyst David Duval.

Duval will take off this week from ESPN to compete in the Champions Tour’s Regions Tradition, leaving the network down a lead analyst for its second-biggest golf week of the year (behind the Masters).

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BACKUPS

Thankfully, ESPN has a deep bench of analysts to call upon for help. Geoff Ogilvy (a rumored candidate for Kevin Kisner’s NBC job), Curtis Strange and Andy North will work on a rotating basis in the lead analyst chair alongside Scott Van Pelt.

ESPN’s coverage at the PGA Championship — which includes complete first- and second-round action and morning coverage on Saturday and Sunday — has earned high marks over the last several years for its embrace of fans’ desire for more golf shots and better tech. The broadcast is operated by ESPN lead golf producer Mike McQuade, and steered by Van Pelt’s hosting skills.

In the current golf TV rights landscape, ESPN lands a distant third place in terms of on-air hours, behind both NBC and CBS. The truth, though, is that the network’s high-flying style scratches an itch for many golf fans, mirroring many of CBS’s strengths in pacing and brainy analysis.

THE BEST FORM OF FLATTERY…

McQuade’s lead analyst decision, however, mirrors one made by NBC golf head honchos Tommy Roy and Sam Flood in 2024, when the network elected to broadcast the majority of the season with a rotating tryout in the lead chair.

Eventually, NBC settled upon Kevin Kisner as the lead man, and enjoyed the rotating cast so much they stuck to it. Today, NBC’s ‘odd-even’ system divvies hole responsibilities by broadcaster to improve preparation and allow on-air talent to “eavesdrop” on golfers, providing more specific analysis.

ESPN won’t go full odd-even this weekend at the PGA. Instead, the network will rotate lead analysts based on their availability. But the network’s decision shows that NBC’s trial period from 2024 is a good solution in a pinch when analyst availability isn’t what it seems.

ODD TIMES

ESPN did not release the reason for Duval’s PGA Tour Champions departure. The network’s statement indicated that it expects Duval to return for the 2026 PGA Championship at Aronimink in Philadelphia.

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The post The man who filmed Scottie Scheffler’s arrest tells the full story appeared first on Golf.

The post The man who filmed Scottie Scheffler’s arrest tells the full story appeared first on Golf.

His drive in darkness from the Embassy Suites in Louisville to Valhalla Golf Club was designed to be uninteresting: 30 minutes of boredom on a few interstates and a two-lane highway in Kentucky before a long day in golf. He didn’t know the context that would greet him when he arrived to find a traffic jam outside the golf course — context that would change his life by the time the sun rose in Louisville on Friday morning. Soon, though, Jeff Darlington would learn it all: The story of the World No. 1 golfer’s stunning arrest, of a shocking police response, and his own role as one of the few eyewitnesses to the golf story of the year.

The ESPN reporter was a golf TV newbie when he hopped in his car before dawn on Friday morning at the 2024 PGA Championship. He’d been a golf diehard forever, and he’d waited a long time for his employers to ask him onto their golf portfolio. Now, at Valhalla, he’d gotten his breakthrough.

Darlington was a unique fit for golf. Raised in Florida, he’d cut his teeth as a print reporter for University of Florida sports and the Miami Dolphins before shifting to TV with ESPN’s NFL coverage. He was, in many ways, the archetype of the modern sports reporter: majoring in storytelling and minoring in versatility. Underpinning both of those skillsets was a background in journalism; the business of context.

It was there, outside Valhalla Golf Club in the pre-dawn hour, that Darlington first saw something peculiar. A white, tournament-branded SUV sliced in front of a traffic chokepoint, leaving a screaming police officer in a yellow rainjacket chasing behind. Seconds later, the officer pulled the driver from the car and placed him in handcuffs.

It was only then that Darlington got a good look at the driver, a young man with a beard, his clothing adorned with an unmistakeable Nike swoosh. The Louisville police had detained Scottie Scheffler, the No. 1 golfer in the world.

Darlington immediately stepped out of the car and started recording a video on his phone as he walked toward the officers. He tried to talk to the officers — he’s heard on the video yelling “Guys!” — but when it became clear they were going to arrest Scheffler anyway, he stopped recording and starting reporting.

“I never even looked at my phone after I posted the video,” Darlington told GOLF.com. “I just remember putting my phone down and saying, Focus on the camera. Because everybody’s gonna find the story, but I felt like the story required some nuance and context that TV could create.”

Nuance had a few meanings in the minutes after Scheffler’s arrest, but mostly it meant detail. Darlington had seen every second of the interaction, from Scheffler’s attempt to route through traffic into the golf course to the moment the squad car left the scene with Scheffler in the back. The reporter was one of the only people in the world who knew exactly what’d happened.

“I had every bit of context,” Darlington said. “A lot of times for any story like that, you don’t have every bit of context.”

But even with the benefit of a first-person view, he was struggling to make sense of what he saw.

“If you walk into a situation like that, you have to assume that the law enforcement has a reason to do this,” he said. “But then there’s part of me that’s saying, just logically, that felt really aggressive and really unnecessary. And then you add a layer of I am familiar with Scottie Scheffler. I certainly know his reputation. We’re talking about someone who is just not that guy.”

It wasn’t until after Scheffler had driven away that Darlington says he realized the full scope of what happened. The rest of the world failed to see the situation’s innocence, how easily it might have happened to anyone. The traffic chokepoint, the player who’d been instructed to bypass it, and yes, the officer who’d failed to piece together why his orders weren’t immediately followed — all were plausible points of failure in Scheffler’s situation reaching an amiable conclusion.

Scheffler didn’t deserve to be freed on the basis of his fame, but his fame was another critical part of the story. Had he not been a professional golfer with a tee time, he would not have been trying to enter the golf course, and might not have trusted that on-site security would see his courtesy vehicle and let him through. And had the officers tried to learn who Scheffler was, they might have understood his motive for cutting through traffic, and might not have followed through with the arrest.

“No one wanted to be an adult in the room,” Darlington says. “Until the guy came up to me after with his pad out and said, ‘And who was it that we just arrested?’ I go, That was Scottie Scheffler. It was only at that point that I realized, ‘Oh, you guys don’t have any idea what you’re getting into.'”

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The police weren’t the only ones acting on instinct. Darlington sprung into action the second Scheffler emerged from the car. Without consciously thinking about it, he’d clicked into his inner reporter: seeking to understand the situation in its entirety and cover it as such.

“I had friends say, you should have gotten arrested with him,” Darlington says with a laugh. “You never know how you’re going to handle that situation until you’re in it.”

In the days that followed, Darlington felt concerned the story might have burned a bridge with Scheffler. He wasn’t trying to dramatize one of the most serious moments of Scheffler’s life, and he certainly wasn’t trying to pilfer fame from Scheffler’s legal troubles. But the arrest was also one of the stories of Darlington’s life; it was his duty to cover it fairly.

Darlington reached out a few days later to apologize for the media circus, but Scheffler cut him off.

“He was worried that I thought that he was doing it to help himself,” Scheffler said in a story that was later relayed on Pardon My Take. “I was like ‘listen man, I’m glad that somebody saw what happened.'”

In truth, Darlington had handled the situation flawlessly — and his eyewitness account of the arrest had served as a necessary component of Scheffler’s eventual release. Scheffler had witnessed, and intuited, one of the key reasons for the press’s existence: If not for Darlington’s coverage, the truth of the situation might never have come to light — and the headlines would have read much differently.

“What really blows my mind, which is one thing, but the reason I got arrested is because the police officer charged me second-degree assault,” Scheffler said. “That’s a very serious charge.”

Even if Darlington didn’t want to take advantage of the situation, his career has benefited from the story. After a strong week of coverage at the Masters, he will serve as one of the network’s most prominent voices at this week’s PGA Championship in Charlotte, N.C., where a reunion interview with Scheffler is in the works.

If there is a lesson from the morning of Scheffler’s arrest, Darlington says it’s simpler than the arguments that have played out over social media over the last 12 months. The story of that morning at the PGA Championship is not about good guys and bad guys, but about the virtue of cooler heads.

“I don’t care if it’s Scottie Scheffler or anybody, he deserves to have everybody calm down, assess the fact that maybe there were some misunderstandings about where people were supposed to go, and figure things out,” Darlington said. “It doesn’t matter who he is, everybody deserves that context.”

Context. It’s Jeff Darlington’s business, and many days that’s nothing special … right up until the morning it changed the golf world.

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The post How Johnson Wagner duffed his way to golf-TV stardom appeared first on Golf.

The post How Johnson Wagner duffed his way to golf-TV stardom appeared first on Golf.

Two hours after Bryson DeChambeau won the U.S. Open at Pinehurst last June, I found him standing in the darkness of the bunker that fronts the 18th green, next to the golf world’s most beloved reenactor, Johnson Wagner.

I was one of maybe two dozen people who witnessed the high watermark of Wagner’s broadcast career, a stuck-to-three-feet sand shot from the same spot where DeChambeau had recorded the shot of his life just hours earlier. In many ways, it was that shot — and not the highlight reel of shanks, flubs and chunks that preceded it — that spawned Golf Channel’s newest content series, highlighting the greatest Tiger Woods shots from his historic 2000 run.

The new series, which will run on Golf Central during this week’s Truist Championship, offers a glimpse into Wagner’s growing stardom as a golf TV everyman, taking him to four settings in the U.S. and Canada where he will try to replicate some of Woods’ most historic shots.

“[Golf Channel EP Matt Hegarty] was like, ‘How would you feel about traveling around and recreating some of Tiger’s best shots?’ And I was like, ‘Can we start in Maui and at St. Andrews?’” Wagner said with a laugh. “He said, ‘No, we have two weeks.’ And so we were off.”

Wagner’s TV career has seen a steady rise from its humble beginnings as a Golf Channel fill-in, but in many ways the former pro is a perfect fit for Golf Channel’s charge into the future, which was the subject of GOLF.com’s conversation with the man himself (which first ran in yesterday’s Hot Mic Newsletter; you may subscribe below.)

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MEA CULPA

Wagner has been but a side character in the broader machinations of golf television over these last 12 months, but his mustachioed brand of celebrity has seen a noticeable rise in status. The cause? Wagner’s on-air reenactments of the greatest, most challenging and most death-defying shots from golf’s biggest events — and his affinity for utter disaster while doing them.

“People will stop me and they’re like, ‘I love what you’re doing. You’re like, you’re doing so much great stuff for golf, and thank you so much,’” Wagner said, sounding somewhat incredulous. “I keep I keep telling people, I wish people would have loved to watch me skull, duff and shank chips back when I played, because I would’ve had a lot more people following me.”

Wagner, who played for a dozen years on the PGA Tour and recorded three wins, knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.  This reaction, after all, was what he was seeking when he first started pressing his agent to pursue broadcast opportunities at the end of his playing career.

Wagner always figured he’d be a good fit on golf TV, where big personalities and nerdy conversations go hand-in-hand. As his playing career wound down, he was spurred on by former player-turned-broadcaster Peter Jacobsen, who saw Wagner’s plainspoken nature as a natural fit on the golf-TV airwaves.

As Wagner looked for his first gig in the media business, he stumbled into a round of golf with SiriusXM’s Taylor Zarzour, who offered to help Wagner get his foot in the door at the PGA Tour’s burgeoning new streaming operation, PGA Tour Live.

THE BEGINNING

After a strong performance as a fill-in at PGA Tour Live turned heads, Wagner got a call from a friend a Golf Channel: Would he like to fill in for them, too? Before long, Wagner received a full-time offer from the network, serving as an analyst on a variety of Golf Channel studio shows.

His facial hair immediately earned him notice in the chair at Golf Channel; his reputation as an analyst unafraid of the occasional blistering opinion or harsh critique followed soon after. One notable example came in the aftermath of the PGA Tour/PIF agreement. Wagner’s on-air soliloquy criticizing the Tour’s handling of the situation went viral, and reflected the kind of on-air backbone that has served him well…even if his critiques haven’t always been as well-received.

“I don’t want to say anything I wouldn’t say straight to a person’s face,” Wagner says. “If I offend somebody, I’m not meaning to do it, I just get paid to talk about golf, and sometimes the way I feel about something is offensive.”

‘DISHEVELED’

Thankfully, most of the golf world delights when they see Wagner. Sober analysis may pay his checks, but his on-air reenactments have made him a cult celebrity. 

The tradition started as a happy accident at the Players Championship last year, when Wagner was sent into the field to provide on-the-ground analysis on the day’s most pressing moments. He started the assignment with a reenactment of a tricky Xander Schauffele chip. Wagner wasn’t warmed up, and the resulting shot was a hosel-rocket. After the segment was over, his producer, Andrew Bradley, fell into an existential spiral.

“Andrew was disheveled,” Wagner says with a grin. “He was like, ‘Man, I really wanted you to hit good shots. I hope you don’t get crushed for this on social media.’”

By the time they returned to the hotel, though, something had changed.

“He said, ‘You need to log on right now, because it’s all positive,’” Wagner says. “At that point, we knew we had something special. If I hit a good shot, people enjoy it, but if I hit a bad shot, they enjoy it more.”

SCREW-UPS

Wagner is quick to point out that he does not try to hit poor shots. But thankfully his paycheck also no longer depends upon him hitting good ones.

“I think sometimes you see some of these short-game shots executed in a major championship and wonder, ‘What I could do from there?’” Wagner says. “And then, boom, I come on screen, and I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna try to hit a shot off the tightest, firmest fairway I’ve ever seen, and pitch over this bunker with spin.’”

This is the secret sauce for Wagner — and it has nothing to do with the difficulty of the shot or the potential of him screwing it up. What separates Wagner is not his humanity, but his willingness to show it.

“When it goes wrong, the people back home can relate to it,” he says. “They feel like I’m relating to their experience.”

The post How Johnson Wagner duffed his way to golf-TV stardom appeared first on Golf.