PGA Tour telecasts (finally) trending up, but biggest issue still looms
Rory McIlroy speaks at the Players Championship.
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PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Xander Schauffele looked out at the press room at the Players Championship with a puzzled expression stretched across his face.
“I might get myself in trouble here,” he said.
He laughed.
“I don’t know a lot about Fan Forward, to be completely honest,” he said. “I saw JT’s e-mail when I was at home and trying to get a better experience for fans, but if you ask me specific questions on it, I will fail this test.”
Schauffele didn’t know it, but he’d perfectly encapsulated the PGA Tour’s current TV predicament. If the Tour is successful in its most significant effort to improve golf on television in decades, one of its most vital players might never know. But if the Tour’s efforts on TV are unsuccessful, the Tour risks alienating a generation of golf fans whose patience is already wearing thin, and earning attention from players like Schauffele in ways commissioner Jay Monahan would rather avoid.
Good news first. The Tour knows it has to get better on TV, and efforts to get there are leading somewhere. For years, the biggest problem facing PGA Tour telecasts was the same problem facing the Tour itself: It was too large, too slow, and much too bureaucratic. Most fans understood that commercials were unlikely to disappear in an environment where the Tour had to generate $700 million in ad revenue each year for its network partners. But why did that render the Tour incapable of changing anything that irked its most loyal consumers?
The Tour introduced the Fan Forward program — a survey that solicited responses from more than 50,000 golf fans — almost exclusively to fix that. The program has identified a roadmap forward for “fixing what can be fixed” in Tour telecasts, in the parlance of many Tour execs. These changes, outlined in Monahan’s annual state-of-the-state speech on Tuesday, include more live golf shots, more player-caddie interactions and an increased focus on cutline battles. According to multiple people at the Tour, the modifications also include new focus group-tested shot sequences that show fewer tap-in putts and a greater number of golf shots per minute.
Many of these changes already are on display, with a few more expected to roll out this weekend at the Players Championship. And while the Golf Twitter army will be relieved to hear there is still ample room to quibble with the Tour’s network partners — including after NBC missed a tournament-deciding moment on Sunday — there is little disagreement that the survey already has produced welcome changes. Before Henley’s tournament-winning eagle at Bay Hill, NBC had delivered one of its more comprehensive Tour telecasts in recent memory, and its analytics-focused approach to the cutline replaced an outdated Friday golf TV tradition with something new and considerably more watchable.
Still, these changes to golf TV can best be viewed as fixes on the margins. They are fixing problems of golf TV that can be fixed, and that’s good, but they fall well short of addressing the proverbial elephant in the room: commercials.
As part of the PGA Tour’s 2019 TV rights agreement with CBS and NBC, the networks air between 17 and 21 minutes of commercials per hour on any given week, and average about 18 minutes of commercials per hour. That’s a tremendous “commercial load,” as it’s called, and it places an equally tremendous burden on the editorial folks responsible for bringing Tour broadcasts to life to stitch together something in the remaining 42 minutes that keeps fans engaged.
The problem, of course, is that the current PGA Tour TV machine basically prints money. Eighteen minutes of commercials per hour might not be the best way to win over an audience, but it turns out to be a great way to make everybody in the golf world (Tours, networks, players and sponsors) very rich. Considering the many pieces of professional golf that remain broken as the golf world turns to Players Championship week, it is understandable and perhaps fair for the Tour to view tweaks to the one irrefutably solid piece of its business as being beyond reproach.
But should commercials be beyond reproach? That’s a different — and worthy — question. Monahan’s state-of-the-state once again covered the annually grazed terrain of the Tour’s many successful efforts with sponsors, including a direct shoutout to several new Fortune 500 partners like Morgan Stanley. Clearly, the Tour’s business is healthy in the minds of these “corporate partners” — healthy enough to spend many millions of dollars sponsoring events and other company components.
Considering this position of commercial strength, and fans’ negative feelings about commercialization, it stands to reason that the Tour’s laws of supply and demand might call for a reassessment. Perhaps by raising the prices of its advertising inventory to see if the Tour can get away with making the same profit margin, but with much fewer interruptions?
“Commercial inventory is one element of the value that our partners generate through our partnership with the PGA Tour,” Monahan said when asked directly about this prospect. “We’re going to do everything that we can to continue to improve and to continue to evolve, but make no mistake about it, the commercial underpinning we receive and the ability for our partners to be able to express their brand and tell their stories is an important element of how we’re able to present the very best tour in the world.”
That wasn’t exactly a resounding “yes!” But is it a resounding no?
“Listen, as we look at our business, there are very few intractable positions when you’re constantly trying to improve,” Monahan said. “The way I look at it is that when we’re sitting here a year from now, I think you’ll see a Tour that continues to have a great story to tell about the way that we’re responding in the interests of our fans, our partners and our players.”
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So you’re saying there’s a chance for a world in which the Tour actually has fewer commercials? Yes, there is a chance — but it is highly dependent upon the Tour continuing to deliver a story worth paying for. It is easy for the writer of this column to dream up a world in which the Tour’s biggest weeks — say, the Signature Events series — are treated as such in the eyes of the Tour and Network sales teams. It is harder to execute that vision in reality.
Still, is it not a vision worth pursuing? The Tour has long protested that the Siggies are a premium product, so why not price the advertising inventory that way and, in turn, make the broadcast feel that way? In that theoretical, the Signature Events would become a virtuous cycle for the Tour, with high-paying advertisers tossing fastballs into the living rooms (and wallets) of suddenly less-beleaguered customers.
Of course, it’s easier to sell your advertising partners on higher prices when you’re delivering on your end of the bargain, and that can also be said for the Tour in 2025. Since the Farmers Insurance Open, Tour viewership is up 16 percent in Nielsen’s new “big data panel” — and by a smaller but still encouraging margin in Nielsen’s more traditional ratings panel.
That viewership rebound can largely be attributed to a successful sophomore season for the Signature Events, particularly in Pebble Beach, which went from three rounds to four in 2025 and also saw a thrilling win by Rory McIlroy. For the first time since they were announced a few years back, the Signature Events seem to be delivering on entertainment value. The schedule is more solidified, the stars are getting together more often, and the big events feel bigger — this is what golf fans were promised.
And what’s more? Golf fans are listening. There’s more progress to be made, and much bigger battles awaiting on the horizon, but it seems the Tour finally has found the spine for the customers of its most important business.
The business of the PGA Tour on TV is getting a facelift.
Whether the stars know it or not.
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