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What the TGL's opening night TV ratings actually mean, how they compare

James Colgan — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 23:05:47 +0000

The TGL is officially off the ground, and the same can be said for its TV ratings.

Golf’s brand-new simulator league aired to 919,000 average viewers on ESPN on Tuesday night, a robust but not earth-shattering total for its first-ever telecast, according to SBJ’s Austin Karp and first reported by the X (formerly Twitter) handle @YeahClickClack. Notably, the TGL telecast was up by 200,000 average viewers over the same time slot a year ago and attracted a larger audience than its lead-in, the Pitt-Duke basketball game, indicating golf fans tuned to ESPN specifically to watch the new league.

If you’re a TV-savvy golf fan feeling somewhat surprised by those numbers — in either direction — we don’t blame you. The TGL’s numbers placed them almost perfectly between the rough averages for LIV telecasts on the CW and PGA Tour telecasts on CBS and NBC. Does that tell us something concrete about the new league relative to its tour counterparts?

The answer is no. TV ratings are inherently subjective, and it’s much too early to compare the TGL to its tour counterparts. The best way to know a league’s success is to compare it against itself, and to control for as many variables as possible. Is the audience growing or shrinking over time? And if so, by how much? Can the audience change be attributed to airing on cable vs. streaming vs. broadcast TV? Of course, change over time is the one data point we don’t have for the TGL, which is part of what will make the next several weeks of ratings reports so critical to its sustained success.

Still, there are things to learn from week 1’s ratings, and I’ll attempt to distill a few of the key takeaways below.

First off, I’d say these ratings qualify as slightly better than expected. On a scale from “smash-hit” to “utter failure,” I’d put the TGL week 1 audience almost squarely in the middle, perhaps trending a few ticks in the positive direction. A few days ago, I predicted in the neighborhood of 700,000 average viewers for the TGL as a solid baseline for week 1, basing that prediction off ESPN’s monthly averages, which hover around 800,000 at this time of year. The TGL benefits from airing in primetime, when the audience size should be much larger. I figured the beneficial timeslot would be canceled out by the league’s novelty and the absence of the league’s most critical stars from week 1, and I felt bearish about the overall number after the first match ended in a blowout. (Ratings are the average number of viewers watching in any one minute of a telecast, and those numbers can be harmed when viewers tune out en masse early because of a blowout, or when viewers lose attention because of a heavy sequence of commercials — two things could have happened in the final hour on Tuesday.)

If you’re a TGL optimist, you’re likely pointing to the lack of week 1 star power and the blowout as reasons why we can expect the numbers to jump from here, particularly with Tiger Woods competing in week 2 on the day after ESPN hosts its biggest telecast of the year, the NFL Wild Card game. To that I’d agree. We are likely to get a larger week 2 audience, and in the bigger picture, there are reasons to be excited: the telecast moved quickly, the players contributed gamely, and the general feedback for the league was supportive. It’s also impressive that the league managed to wrangle those week 1 numbers without a strong lead-in from the basketball game.

But it’s important to clarify that optimism is not the same thing as certainty — and we’re still many ratings reports away from certifying the TGL’s success. The league still has to prove that it can generate TV audiences when its novelty has worn off, and it needs to show that it can turn the Tiger/Wild Card tailwinds into viewership for, say, the Atlanta Drive vs. The Bay on Feb 17. That’s a big ask, and the jury will remain out until the ratings have showed us otherwise.

For now, the news is good. We can say confidently after week 1 that the TGL is not an immediate flop. We can agree that the first batch of numbers is good, and they might get better still. But we should temper that optimism with a dose of reality: long-term TV ratings growth is still the single-largest challenge for the league, and we know nothing about how these numbers will look in a few weeks.

In other words, keep your eyes peeled. The answers are coming soon. Just not today.

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PGA Tour to launch 3 Creator Classics in 2025

James Colgan — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 13:21:29 +0000

If one Creator Classic is good, then isn’t three better?

At least, that’s the PGA Tour’s thinking. On Wednesday morning, the Tour announced its influencer golf tournament series will expand to three events in 2025.

On the morning after the well-received launch of the PGA Tour’s new simulator golf partners, the TGL, the Tour double-dipped into the world of innovative new golf formats by announcing the expansion of the Classic, which aired for the first time to some critical success at the Tour Championship in August 2024. The Players Championship, Truist Championship and Tour Championship will each house Creator Classics featuring more than 20 popular golf influencers in 2025, giving the Tour two influencer-focused events in major cities in the American Southeast (Jacksonville and Atlanta) and one in the northeast (Philadelphia).

Per a release distributed by the Tour, the 2025 iterations of the Creator Classic will be broadcast live on YouTube, ESPN+ and Peacock — and produced in partnership with the content shop Pro Shop, where the Tour maintains a minority ownership stake and board seat.

It’s unclear exactly who will compete in the ’25 iterations of the Creator Classic, but it stands to reason that at least some of the participants will come from the PGA Tour’s new Creator Council, a pro bono board of golf content creators who are consulting the Tour on modernizing its media offerings. The press release mentions that each iteration will have its own “competition format, name and player field.”

Last August’s Creator Classic trial balloon was a success by most objective measures, delivering more than 2.5 million views for the Tour’s YouTube channel and attracting hundreds of thousands of live viewers for its Peacock broadcast. But on a more subjective level, questions remain about bridging the gap between the Tour’s traditional telecasts and the creators’ traditional methods of YouTube creation.

“It missed what made us special,” said Garrett Clark, one of the founders of Good Good Golf who starred in the first iteration of the event.

“The struggle is that blend [of traditional golf broadcast style and YouTube broadcast style],” said Max Putnam, a Good Good creative producer. “We talk about how do you bring more personality to it, but it’s something that we want to keep working on. That’s something I noticed during the Creator Classic as well, I want to see a Cart Cam, I want to hear them talk.”

On a broader level, Wednesday’s announcement marks the latest in a flurry of moves from the PGA Tour to modernize its product in the LIV era. To those ends, the growth opportunities are many and fairly obvious: enhancing the Tour’s TV broadcasts, boosting its YouTube presence, growing its social media presence, and finding opportunities to tap into the vast audience of younger fans who consume golf through the sport’s big creators.

The Tour has signaled the investments to these ends will continue, including with the launch of its brand new production facility in Ponte Vedra Beach at the start of the new year. The Creator Classic is one admittedly flashy investment to those ends.

At the Players Championship in March, we’ll get our first of three chances to see if the audience agrees.

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The TGL's first broadcast gave us a genius innovation ... AND a sugar high

James Colgan — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 07:42:45 +0000

Hello folks, and welcome to an emergency edition of the Hot Mic Newsletter. Tonight we’re talking all things TGL, which launched on Tuesday evening in Palm Beach to a great deal of fanfare. We’ll have lots more to discuss as more information becomes available about the league’s TV ratings, and if you’d like to hear more about that subscribe here, but in the meantime, let’s talk about what we watched.

THE BIG NEWS

In the end, I thought the much-ballyhooed launch of the TGL on ESPN was … fine. The telecast ran for a shade more than two technically sound hours, featured an utter blowout, and did not leave a bitter taste in the mouth of most who tuned in. For a sports league in Season 1, Episode 1 — a league that was perfectly transparent about the fact that its broadcasts will only improve from here — fine feels like a … fine place to be.

BREAKDOWN

Things were teetering in an odd direction a half-hour before the TGL went live at 9 p.m. ET, when the end of the Duke-Pitt basketball game appeared to be crashing into the TGL’s slotted schedule time, threatening to spoil the inaugural broadcast with the golfiest of TV banalities: a coverage delay. Mercifully the game turned into a blowout, they ran the clock and it snuck in under the wire, but the initial tremor of anxiety seemed to hang over the first part of the TGL’s broadcast.

The TGL didn’t show a shot for the first 15 full minutes of the action, electing for a series of player interviews and a brief league overview before launching into the action. Scott Van Pelt’s inclusion offered a legitimate dose of credibility and comfort to the production, but he gave a remote intro from his D.C. studio and the space-time gap was strange. The whole ordeal felt a bit like explaining the rules of a board game before you’ve played a turn — nobody seemed to retain the information, and everyone seemed a little antsy to just get going.

But then the action began with Shane Lowry’s opening tee shot, and the broadcast shot out of a cannon. The biggest lesson of the TGL’s opening broadcast — and perhaps the entire opening day — is that the league’s shot clock is a revelation. Gone is the boredom of incessant pre-shot tinkering and the inherent sleepiness of golf on television. If nothing else, the TGL moves, and that alone gives the format a real chance to survive.

The telecast was structured into three stanzas. The opening five holes, then a commercial break; the middle five holes, then a commercial break; then a brief “intermission” hosted by Van Pelt, another commercial break, and the final five holes. Sure, the speed ebbed a bit as the competition progressed, and the intrigue of the activities in the field of play dissipated as The Bay opened up a blowout lead over NYGC. But there was enough there to keep your attention until the match had been decided, which was around hole 8.

The biggest question after week 1 is the TGL’s ongoing balance between flash and substance. Tuesday’s broadcast felt a bit like a hefty bowl of powdered sugar for dinner. I briefly felt the dopamine hit, I certainly rode an energy high, but by the end I felt a little empty. Is the competition supposed to be serious, funny, or some combination of the two? I’m not upset that I watched, but I still can’t answer that question. I suspect the TGL is still feeling out that comfort zone itself.

GOLD STARS

The Shot Clock: The clock had been deployed for roughly 15 seconds before most golf fans started rethinking the PGA Tour’s approach to enforcing pace-of-play rules. It’s an awesome innovation, and it is the innovation that gives the TGL hope of surviving even as the concept grows less novel with time.

The Camera Setup: There are some 70 cameras bugged throughout SoFi Center like Secret Service Agents — lead producer Jeff Neubarth specifically designed the league’s camera outfit to be invisible from other TV cameras, and therefore invisible to folks at home. It felt like each camera angle was used in some way throughout the action, and spare for a few wildly oversaturated bunker-cam shots, it all whipped around pretty seamlessly. In a nod to the production team’s efforts, shots did not feel overly choreographed or boring to watch after the ball struck the simulator screen.

Virtual golf holes: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I really enjoyed the freakiness of some of the TGL’s virtual designs. The visual extremes play extra-well on TV. If I had a critique of the competition, it was that we needed more tricked-out holes. What a world.

The Microphones: No reasonable viewer expected ESPN host Matt Barrie to have communication with a group of golfers 85 yards away down to an exact science tonight, but the back-and-forthing will be important to the long-term entertainment value of the TGL’s telecasts. The functionality worked, providing a few personality slivers from golf’s stars without being overwrought. Xander Schauffele performed particularly well.

SVP: Van Pelt, ESPN’s voice for the PGA Championship and Masters, offered some considerable credibility to the TGL right off the bat. His pre-and-postgame interviews (the latter part of his midnight SportsCenter with SVP) were incisive and effortless. The players clearly have a rapport with him, and his decades of golf experience make him uniquely apt to thread the needle between golf’s traditional dialect and its new simulator slang. Even his touch of self-deprecation about the (slightly horrifying) caricature crafted by the TGL’s marketing team was deft. I was a fan of his inclusion all the way around.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

The live discussion: It was hard to parse through the noise on Tuesday night. What was player conversation? What was broadcaster banter? What was part of an interview with guests Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy? What was music blaring over the SoFi Center? To me, it felt like there was so much to say that it was hard to hear anything at all. Some personality shined through here, but the forthcoming weeks figure to feature a lot more.

The “Intermission”: The TGL’s decision to include a lengthy “intermission” segment with SVP — sort of like a halftime report — was a real rally-killer. The sequence of commercial-intermission-commercial lasted exactly 10 minutes just after the match had been decided, and when the competition returned again, the energy felt like it’d been sucked out. Maybe this will be better when the matches are closer, but I think it might be better to reimagine this format altogether.

DJ Khaled: Please, no more.

Live Interviews: Tiger and Rory are both big gets for any live golf telecast because their depth of experience and golf intellect are unparalleled. The problem with Tuesday’s interviews was that neither golfer had much more experience with the TGL than anyone watching at home and the broadcast got caught asking them questions even as the action sped on. Their presence was hardly a bad idea, but with all the other noise happening at the same time, I don’t think viewers came away with much.

THE NUMBERS

There is no “normal” for a product like the TGL, but I’d guess anything in the neighborhood of 700,000 average viewers would be acceptable for week 1 on ESPN.

The network’s weekly average has hovered in the neighborhood for months, and the TGL was buffeted by a Duke basketball lead-in on Tuesday night. The TGL’s hopes of ascribing to ESPN primetime averages (closer to 2 million, but aided by the NFL and NBA) remain a longshot, but beating LIV while staying safely clear of the PGA Tour seems reasonable.

WHAT IT TELLS US

We won’t know the numbers for a few days, but they won’t tell us much. Any outrageously bad or good numbers should (and will) be considered, but anything in the mushy middle should be considered a data point on a graph we’re going to fill in over these next few weeks.

Hop aboard the simulator golf train, kids: We’re going for a ride!

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The hidden motivation behind the PGA Tour's massive new building

James Colgan — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 15:40:54 +0000

A stroll through the PGA Tour’s brand-new studio building in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., evokes an unmistakeable comparison.

If the building’s next-door neighbor, PGA Tour HQ, is the Death Star — then this building, PGA Tour Studios, is the Death Star II. They’re mirror images of one another, each hulking along the skyline in masses of dark-tinted glass, and each arming the PGA Tour to achieve its goals of interplanetary dominance.

If you ask those at the Tour, the brand-new campus, which opened officially on New Year’s Day, will be the Tour’s bridge (or should we say moat) to the future. Tour HQ will house the day-to-day operations of golf’s largest professional tour, and its next-door neighbor will house the day-to-day operations of the Tour’s moneymaking business: media.

“Look, the point of the building beyond anything is to bring better content to our fans. To increase the level of production, the quality of production, and the quality of content that we bring to our fans,” says Luis Goicouria, the Tour’s SVP of media. “Because ultimately, it all stems from that, right? That’s number one. We feel like, if you do that, your business grows.”

With the critical exception of the editorial operations of network TV broadcasts (those will remain with NBC and CBS), everything touched by PGA Tour “media” will pass through the Death Star II. That includes YouTube, player content, PGA Tour Live and International broadcasts, studio shows, and anything else that isn’t already paid for by CBS, NBC and Golf Channel. In a world where sports leagues are much closer to media companies than ticket salesmen, that makes the new PGA Tour Studios the most valuable space in the Tour business without a tee box or a putting green.

Nobody will dispute that the new facility is dazzling. The building features 165,000 square feet of space; seven studios (with the capacity to grow to 12), six studios with massive LED walls, eight control rooms, eight voiceover rooms, and, yes, a movie theater. Now that it is open, the new facility will house the entirety of PGA Tour Live broadcast production, allow for the creation of several international-specific broadcast feeds, and give the Tour the capacity to create multitudes more content than ever before, including for sports far outside of golf. In a twist, perhaps the most impressive piece of the whole facility is what isn’t in it: the Tour built 25 percent of the new facility to sit empty on opening day, future-proofing the building for whatever sparkling new gadgets become a part of the Tour’s media business in the next 25 years.

But those sparkly stats fail to close a critical plot hole: Why build another Death Star? Even among those in the know in sports media, there is little consensus for why the Tour elected to spend untold millions building a new facility for media, particularly as other leagues are shrinking the size of internal media, consolidating content efforts, and, in the NFL’s case, threatening to disband certain pieces of their state-run operation altogether. Even if the untold millions for the Tour’s new facility were greenlighted in 2019, long before golf’s cash craze reached a fever pitch and these sports-wide trends became established, the business case is curious. In a world where sports media companies are learning to construct whole programming schedules with fewer voices, smaller overhead and tighter budgets, is it smart for the Tour to be quadrupling down in those same businesses?

Perhaps that thinking fails to understand a critical piece of the PGA Tour’s. The point of a brand-new studio building isn’t about high-tech studios or tech-company-adjacent office space; it’s about something much simpler: Control.

“I think it’s not just production control. I think it’s overall control of our product,” says Goicouria, the Tour’s SVP of media. “That includes the product and it includes production of our live events.”

It is no secret that media is the golden goose at PGA Tour headquarters — or any other moneymaking sports league in the modern world. Years of strong ratings and consistent viewership demographics have made sports some of the advertising world’s most valuable terrain, which means more money for the networks broadcasting sports, the governing bodies organizing them, and the athletes competing within them.

The good news for the Tour is that the value of sports television rights has never been higher. The collapse of the cable television model has only strengthened the value of sports rights, because sports rights have proved the only telecasts reliably able to deliver big audiences to networks in a post-cable world. As a result, leagues have made money hand-over-fist — and in increments multiplying every few years — for the better part of the last decade.

But that upper hand has established an undercurrent of risk. As the value of sports TV rights has skyrocketed, so has the percentage of the PGA Tour’s overall revenue tied to TV deals. If something were to happen to the value of those rights, or the networks paying for them, the Tour would be in big trouble.

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This type of risk exposure thinking is, to be clear, a good problem for the PGA Tour, which has made billions off the new sports rights paradigm. It is also an unlikely problem; there is no evidence that we are living in a so-called “sports rights bubble,” and networks have still managed to turn profits off the outrageously inflated cost of TV rights. But, like an X-Wing flying into the center of the Death Star II, it is a problem with grave consequences, which brings us back to the new building in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

In this sense, PGA Tour Studios is a physical piece of PGA Tour control. The building allows the Tour to dictate all pieces of its TV and media rights without outside production assistance. In one way, the new facility is a piece of risk mitigation, allowing the Tour to protect its rear should something happen to one of its longtime broadcast TV partners, NBC or CBS, at the end of the current rights agreement in 2029. In another, it is a piece of old-fashioned leverage, giving the Tour the freedom to pursue any future TV partner should another offer beat NBC or CBS’s. This kind of leverage is particularly key given the exploding world of sports streaming, where tech companies like Amazon, Netflix and Apple have shown a willingness to throw around silly sums of cash for sports rights, but have preferred not to entangle themselves with expensive production staffs.

Still, the new PGA Tour Studios isn’t solely a missile deployment in a proxy war. The building will serve real purposes in 2025 and beyond, including the expansion of ESPN’s PGA Tour Live and the continued growth of the Tour’s digital and social media offerings. These are real changes that the Tour hopes will shape public perception of pro golf, and by extension, add value to future rights deals no matter who comes to the negotiating table.

“It’s important that the Tour knows how to produce golf, and we produce more live golf than anybody in the world,” Goicouria says. “If you think about our next round of media negotiations, we may well do a deal with a company that doesn’t produce sports at all, or that does produce sports but doesn’t produce golf. [With PGA Tour Studios] we can essentially give them a turnkey product.”

Of course, control has other benefits for the Tour. Owning the levers of editorial and production gives the Tour a say in how most of its content looks to the world, allowing the Tour to protect its players, brands and sponsors. Control also protects the Tour from current and future competitors, ensuring Tour telecasts will have their own distinct, repeatable feel.

“The networks still have the talent. They still have the front bench with [NBC Sports lead producer] Tommy Roy and [CBS Sports lead producer] Sellers Shy, and that’s important to us,” Goicouria said. “But this building is really part two of a two-part process that started last year when we launched this new fleet of trucks. We felt like, this is too important for us to license. We need to own it.“

For now, though, there is nothing to do but wait until the fruits of this five-year PGA Tour gamble come fully to life.

The doors are open, and the Death Star II is fully operational.

This has been another digital edition of the Hot Mic Newsletter. As always, if you’d like to be the first to receive exclusive insights like these directly from me, click the link here to subscribe to our free newsletter send.

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'The Skins Game' is coming back to TV in 2025 in deal with Pro Shop

James Colgan — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 21:16:38 +0000

Once upon a time, golf owned a small but notable slice of the holiday season sports calendar with a series called The Skins Game.

The idea was not particularly novel — a made-for-TV skins game competed between some of the top stars on the PGA Tour — but it was valuable. At a time of the year when people were gathered together and off from work, the original Skins Game had a Black Friday broadcast that became habitual viewing for golf fans, which made it a low-risk way for the Tour to add a few more shekels to the media rights deals that make up the majority of its annual revenue.

The Skins Game was formally canceled in 2008 after LG dropped out as a title sponsor. At the time, PGA Tour officials credited the failure with sagging ratings. A decade later, Hollywood producer and longtime Phil Mickelson co-conspirator Bryan Zuriff resuscitated the idea, pitting Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson against one another for an obscene sum of cash in an event he called The Match. The idea wasn’t particularly well-liked by the Tour, which didn’t possess the broadcast rights to the event and by extension lost out on the event’s revenue potential, but the Tour granted its players a waiver to compete in the events (which have continued each year since) with the understanding the event wouldn’t compete directly with PGA Tour broadcasts.

Now, though, the PGA Tour is stepping back into the driver’s seat. On Thursday morning, the PGA Tour and the golf media startup Pro Shop announced plans to revive The Skins Game with a match on Black Friday 2025. The Tour, a minority owner in Pro Shop, will own the rights to the event, but hand over distribution to Pro Shop, which will work with another media boutique, Propagate Media, to deliver the made-for-TV event to audiences.

“Reimagining an iconic event like The Skins Game in a retro-modern way that engages today’s sports fans is exactly why the PGA Tour has partnered with Pro Shop,” said Chris Wandell, an executive at the Tour and board member of Pro Shop, in a release. “We look forward to seeing how the newest iteration of The Skins Game unfolds as Pro Shop and Propagate identify cast, format and creative approach.”

Principally, the news marks the latest effort from the Tour to revitalize its media footprint in the LIV era, a strategic shift leading to Tour investments like Pro Shop, a Tour-affiliated media outlet; the Creator Classic, a made-for-TV influencer event; and the new PGA Tour studios, a multimillion-dollar twin for the Tour’s hulking global headquarters. At the center of much of that shift is the idea of control; the Tour believes its media business is best served by maintaining ownership from concept to distribution. The return of The Skins Game in particular marks a notable punch back for the Tour at a rare corner of golf television without the Tour’s corporate footprint.

The timing of Thursday’s announcement is conspicuous at best, arriving just days before another made-for-TV golf match the PGA Tour doesn’t own, the Crypto.com Showdown. The Showdown, which will pit two PGA Tour players (Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy) against two LIV players (Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka), appears to be the first in a new iteration of events aimed at reconvening players from golf’s warring tours. Like other events of the Match series, it is owned by Zuriff and Warner Bros. Discovery, which pays a “rights release” fee (reportedly around $1 million) to the Tour and an appearance fee to each of the players involved.

The Tour’s minority ownership of Pro Shop, which was co-founded by Chad Mumm, the producer behind the popular Netflix Full Swing series, gives both parties the freedom to dream up a vision for The Skins Game distinct from the rest of its TV offerings. Propagate has worked extensively with streamers like AppleTV, Netflix and Max, and is currently handling studio work for a forthcoming AppleTV golf comedy show featuring Owen Wilson.

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TGL announces ESPN broadcast team led by Scott Van Pelt

James Colgan — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 16:41:20 +0000

Golf’s techiest new league is slowly coming online.

The TGL, a simulator golf league led by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, announced its first broadcast team on Thursday morning, spotlighting the group of TV and digital media pros who will face the challenge of bringing the first-of-its-kind league to life on ESPN in January.

Beloved golf TV voice Scott Van Pelt will lead off the proceedings for the TGL, serving as the broadcast’s “host.” Van Pelt will add the TGL to his current ESPN golf portfolio, which includes the Masters and PGA Championship, though his role for the TGL will resemble his role for ESPN’s Monday Night Football coverage. Van Pelt will host pregame and intermission coverage from his SportsCenter studio in Washington, D.C., a role that will also include some player interviews.

Once the action begins, Van Pelt will hand over broadcasting duties to a pair of fellow Masters and PGA Championship TV voices, Matt Barrie and Marty Smith, who will serve as ESPN’s play-by-play and sideline reporters, respectively. The league has said its broadcasts will aim to provide unprecedented access to the league’s players, including an open line of microphones between those broadcasting the action and those competing within it. That means interesting things for both Barrie and Smith, who will speak to the teams in real time as the action is unfolding.

On the digital side, my GOLF.com colleague Claire Rogers will join NESN Red Sox sideline reporter Jahmai Webster as hosts of the TGL’s second-screen efforts on ESPN+, taking viewers behind the scenes of life on the TGL. Roger Steele, another popular golf creator, will handle emcee duties.

The announcement marks the latest major step toward bringing the TGL to life after its inaugural season was postponed by a generator failure last December. The league, which includes six franchises and 24 PGA Tour players, will bring golf to primetime audiences on Monday and Tuesday nights in the winter months. A custom-built facility named the SoFi Center in Palm Beach, Fla. will house each of the TGL’s competitions, featuring players competing on a giant simulator screen on virtual golf courses designed exclusively for the league. (If you have more questions about the competitive design of the league, you can check out the video explainers on the TGL YouTube page.)

Of course, the broader push of the TGL is to deliver a television product that golf fans will want to watch each week, allowing the league to make money from selling its TV rights. The league has no shortage of institutional support, counting the PGA Tour, the billionaire sports magnates behind the Strategic Sports Group, and corporate partners like Genesis and SoFi among its partners, in addition to Woods and McIlroy. The hope is that the new league will appeal to younger golf fans, including those in cities with increased exposure to simulator golf, giving Woods a platform to play competitively as his PGA Tour career moves increasingly part-time.

Play in the TGL will begin with the league’s first two-hour match on Tuesday, January 7, and will continue on Mondays and Tuesdays through March 25, 2025.

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Behind the scenes of NBC Sports' Kevin Kisner hire

James Colgan — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 17:47:01 +0000

The courtship between NBC Sports and the network’s newest lead golf analyst, Kevin Kisner, started in December 2023, but it took more than nine months before anyone dared to define the relationship.

Now in late September, it was time, at long last, for a hometown visit. As golf season bled into football, a convoy of NBC Sports brass including golf head honcho Sam Flood, president Rick Cordella and executive producer Tommy Roy made plans to visit Kisner at his permanent home in Aiken, S.C. The goal? To pitch Kisner on taking his broadcasting talents full-time. After nine months of tiptoeing around their interest — Kisner insisted on playing out the remainder of his pro career before leaving for TV, while NBC dished lead analyst duties at the U.S. Open and Open Championship to Brandel Chamblee and Luke Donald — NBC was ready to go all-in.

A full-time commitment wasn’t on anyone’s mind for too long in the months preceding September. Not after NBC announced Kisner as temporary lead analyst for a handful of big-time PGA Tour events (The Sentry, WM Phoenix Open, and Players) filling in for Paul Azinger. Not after Kisner impressed NBC Sports brass with his performance, balancing his knowledge of the pro game with his rib-cutting sense of humor. And not even after Kisner enjoyed the experience enough to sign on for NBC’s coverage of the season-ending FedEx Cup Playoff events, a three-week trial run that would closely mirror life in the full-time gig.

The truth is that neither party was ready for the next step. Kisner’s two years of remaining PGA Tour eligibility meant he wasn’t in the place to take the NBC job for most of 2024, and NBC was weary of the risks posed by hiring a TV neophyte while its broadcast underwent a broader editorial reimagining under Flood. It would have been convenient for Kisner to fill Azinger’s vacated lead analyst seat immediately, avoiding staffing headaches with the U.S. Open and Open Championship broadcasts and confusion from the golf world. NBC preferred this path enough to explore adding a full-time analyst in early ’24, but the job’s prestige and multimillion-dollar investment demanded a home-run swing. The network, perhaps scarred from the end of Azinger’s tenure, decided it was best to wait for the right pitch.

Flood, Cordella and Roy arrived in Aiken in the fall to find Kisner feeling open-minded. The clock was ticking on the 40-year-old pro, who now had just one year remaining of PGA Tour eligibility courtesy of a lifetime top-50 earners exemption. He would get into a dozen or so Tour events in 2025, but would be mostly relegated to weaker-field events. If his play improved — unlikely for a player of Kisner’s age (40) and length (181st on Tour in 2024) — his playing schedule might fill, but that was uncertain. On the other hand, if his play kept with its recent trajectory, he would be available for most weeks of NBC’s PGA Tour coverage in 2025, and his playing career would be over in 2026.

In other words, if NBC was willing to work with him on the details, Kisner was open to taking the gig.

“I have a great relationship with Sam Flood. I like the way he talks about things. He’s very straight up, and that’s the way I am,” Kisner said. “My wife and I sat down with [Flood, Cordella and Roy] for three-and-a-half hours and just discussed life. We talked about the future — what we felt like was good, bad, how to make golf better, how they thought I could fit into their team.”

At the end of the conversation, the decision was made. Kisner would take on 10 events in 2025 and the permanent title of NBC Golf lead analyst while maintaining part-time PGA Tour playing privileges. If his playing career got in the way of the arrangement, NBC would be flexible, and if not, NBC would be the beneficiary.

“They’ll work with me in 2025,” Kisner said. “If something happens where I win and play great, they said, ‘that’s great.’ And I’ll play more golf. And if not, then I told them they have my full commitment in 2026.”

For NBC, Kisner was worth the gymnastics. Of all the analysts tested in ’24, Kisner had been the network’s top performer. He was the first outside selection for what became a rotating tryout in the lead chair throughout 2024, and the candidate whose performances in the booth drew the most buzz. On the weeks he joined the NBC team, Kisner enjoyed a lively rapport with play-by-play man (and buddy) Dan Hicks, made headlines for his colorful critiques, and seemed to grasp the finer points of analysis — amplify, clarify, explain — quickly.

“With all Tour players, I’m paying attention to how they handle press conferences and interviews, how they react with their caddies on the air,” Roy said. “I’m always trying to get a feeling about whether they’re a good communicator.”

“With Kevin, I started making attempts to talk to him on the range years ago. I would tell him, Hey, when the day comes that you’re ready to call it a wrap playing golf, I really think you have a chance to be in our business here, and successful at it.”

Even with Roy’s endorsement, Kisner’s entrance into the lead chair qualifies as an upset. The 40-year-old pro gives NBC something it hasn’t had in more than 30 years: a lead analyst who isn’t a major championship winner. That bucks decades of tradition in golf TV, where the prevailing sentiment has long been that lead analyst jobs are restricted only to those with major championship pedigree and a firsthand knowledge of history-altering moments.

There is a reasonable argument that the practice is outdated. Some of the biggest success stories in recent sports TV history have been players with less-than-historic statlines (Pat McAfee), while FOX’s $100 million contract with Tom Brady has shown that even all-time great players can struggle in the booth. Said differently, an analyst’s background means nothing if their insight isn’t interesting or informative.

“I want the 12-handicap at the club or on his couch to go, yeah, he was right about that, I’m going to try that, or, that’s exactly what happened,” said Kisner, who is expected to call the U.S. Open, Open Championship and Ryder Cup for NBC in 2025. “And then I want Scottie Scheffler or Max Homa or Brian Harman to go, Yeah, I did pull the heck out of that putt. Or, yeah, I made a terrible swing in that position. I want everybody to say, that’s exactly what happened. That’s why I’m sitting in that seat.”

Criticism is an art form in the lead analyst’s chair, where the subjects of criticism often watch closely. It helped NBC’s confidence to know Kisner had a net in the biggest moments. By the time Kisner signed his contract, the network had already decided to bring back a big broadcast experiment from 2024, the “odd-even” format, splitting play-by-play and analyst duties between teams designated to odd and even-numbered holes. The goal of the strategy, Flood and Roy said, is to facilitate a conversation between broadcasters that fans can “eavesdrop” in on, rather than having broadcasters speak to the audience at home. NBC hopes the shift to “odd-even” will make life easier for Kisner as he switches to golf TV. It will simplify preparation, for example, and create fewer, more targeted speaking opportunities.

But Kisner isn’t worried about flying off the handle. Quite the opposite. The biggest problem facing the networks is making something entertaining, he says, and his biggest advantage is understanding how to bridge the divide between players leery of the media business and a sports economy that is an extension of it.

“I think there’s always been a narrative that there were two sides, right? The media and then the golfers. It was always like the golfers didn’t want to divulge too much, because they didn’t want the media to mess up or picture them in a bad light,” Kisner says. “The more I’ve been on both sides, the more I realize the partnership should never be greater than now. The media is the biggest immediate deal. The media rights deal for the PGA Tour is the biggest moneymaker they have, and the players need to understand that the better they make the product on TV, the more money they can play for, and the more money they can make.”

These are the cold realities of the sports business, and in the scores-obsessed world of the PGA Tour, Kisner’s grasp of the media’s importance has long made him an outlier. Good golfers earn paychecks, he recognizes, but wealthy golfers earn eyeballs. That understanding is what pushed him into YouTube and podcasting well before NBC came along, and it’s what will give him a second life in the second-biggest golf TV job in the world.

In Kisner’s telling, the simplest version of his new role at NBC is to serve as an emissary between golf’s two at-times conflicting camps: the players and the people. Many broadcasters have tried their hand at helping the people understand the players, but Kisner says he feels he could help the relationship work the other way, too.

“Hopefully these top players understand that I’m their buddy first. I’m never going to do anything to make them feel disrespected or hurt their brand. I’m there to tell the truth,” Kisner says. “I’m going to tell it just like I did when they’re sitting there with me in the locker room, and I’m also going to go play with them the next week, so I’m never going to make a controversial statement just to get clicks. I tell it like it is, man, and that’s what I’ve done my whole career. Ask any player, they know where they stand with me at all times, and that’s what I plan to do in the booth.”

Of course, the truth has many shades, but Kisner seems uniquely adept at managing discomfort surely heading his way. He’s funny in a way that hasn’t graced golf televisions since David Feherty, and he’s already dreaming up ways to turn the audience quickly into his corner, even if it means running afoul of the FCC.

“I’m trying to see if Tommy will let me do my on-camera with my shirt off,” Kisner says, referencing his now-infamous Presidents Cup bet with Max Homa. “Dan and I will go down to our skivvies, and introduce me to the world.”

He pauses just after he delivers the punchline, as if to hold for laughter.

It’s a showman’s touch, and that’s exactly the point.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com. To subscribe to GOLF’s media newsletter, click the link here.

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The PGA Tour's newest business partners? Influencers

James Colgan — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 15:32:16 +0000

The PGA Tour can feel your eyes rolling.

For all its (sometimes) stodgy corporate might, the Tour doesn’t need new chief marketing officer Andy Weitz to know that Friday morning’s news — announcing the creation of the all-new “Creator Council” — will go over with a healthy dose of snark.

If a business’s most holy responsibility is to understand the consumer, then the PGA Tour knows this one isn’t for everyone. In fact, it knows a crossover episode between the Tour and golf’s most prominent influencers lands with a certain subsection of the core demographic like a 6-iron to the skull.

But critically, the Tour also grasps the crisis facing professional golf. The symptoms of this disease are many — the explosion of LIV, the intrusion of rogue billions into golf, the slow decline of the golf TV product, the genericization of the playing class and the loss of Tiger Woods — but the result is singular: After five decades of precipitous growth, pro golf is seizing, and its audience is shrinking.

That’s why the Tour is okay with a few eye rolls on Friday morning, the same day it announced a partnership with seven golf social media brands to form the all-new “Creator Council,” in which influencers will trade strategy and insight with the Tour in exchange for enhanced access to events and content creation opportunities. The group is expected to meet regularly with PGA Tour executive leadership including Weitz to discuss fan engagement opportunities, content strategy and broadcast enhancements, among other topics.

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The agreement is an old-fashioned quid pro quo — no money is involved, and it isn’t needed. For the Tour, the benefits of pairing near-limitless scale with the institutional content knowledge of the creator community are obvious. For those who love golf enough to land the job title of “content creator,” the benefits of working with the Tour are even better: exclusive content access from the long heavily regulated fairways of PGA Tour events, and a taste of the oodles of viral-ready content that come with it.

That might not sound like much, but it was enough to get partners totaling more than 15 million followers to sign up, including Bryan Bros Golf, Erik Anders Lang, Foreplay/Barstool Sports, No Laying Up, Paige Spiranac, Roger Steele and Tisha Alyn.

“We want to learn from creators,” Weitz told GOLF.com. “First, we want to give them access [to us], because we acknowledge there are some places where we can do better with our own voice. Second, there are opportunities where we can co-create, and give the fan even more of what they want. And then third, there might be situations where the creators should lead, and we need to give them access to our platform to do that.”

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The program marks the continuation of the PGA Tour’s recent lurch toward new media, where content creators have found scores of young fans eager to watch golf content, defying the sport’s reputation as an old man’s game. Introducing some of that digital audience to the Tour represents a massive opportunity for the Tour business, which collects the vast majority of its annual revenue from media rights agreements tied to the size of its TV audiences. At the simplest level, more followers and subscribers means more fans, and fans are good for business.

The opportunity helps to explain recent Tour trial balloons like the Creator Classic, a televised influencer outing that drew several million views, and Skratch, a digital media brand whose resuscitation under Full Swing EP Chad Mumm received millions in seed funding from the Tour. It also explains some of the core pieces of the Creator Council, which include expanding the Creator Classic to additional Tour events and working to loosen media regulations.

Notably, many of the Creator Council’s initial invitees come from the booming world of YouTube golf. In a chief piece of irony, the PGA Tour’s official YouTube handles (1.5 million) have fewer followers than former PGA Tour member Bryson DeChambeau (1.63 million), who departed the Tour for LIV in part to cultivate his own media presence. DeChambeau may be an outlier among his pro golfer counterparts for his showmanship, and the YouTube algorithm might boost individual creators, but there is little debate from either side that the combined might of the Tour presents an opportunity for a YouTube audience several times larger than any individual player.

There are still questions about the ultimate value of a large YouTube audience — many creators say the most profitable pieces of their business are merchandise sales and direct sponsorships, not YouTube ad dollars — but there is little doubt that every eyeball has meaning to the PGA Tour in these days of sagging ratings and tour wars.

“This idea didn’t start with the business case. This idea started with an opportunity to better understand what our fans want from the PGA Tour,” Weitz said. “If we get it right with fans, if we understand how they’re consuming content and how they’re engaging with other aspects of the golf landscape, we can ultimately serve them better. And yes, that will be better for our business. But this is about changing the way we think about engaging with our fan base.”

Engagement has been a popular word at Tour HQ this fall, particularly as Weitz and Co. work through the results of the first-ever Fan Forward survey — a pilot program designed to get fan feedback on PGA Tour broadcasts. In that sense, the Creator Council represents an extension of the efforts, this time aimed at sourcing feedback from some of the Tour’s most valuable outsiders.

Of course, there is a competitive advantage to the Council. LIV’s YouTube inroads are not small, and the league’s players have taken advantage of partnerships with some of YouTube golf’s biggest names already. (Last week, Phil Mickelson announced a two-on-two content series alongside uber-popular YouTuber Grant Horvat.) By securing a group working with the Tour, the Tour isn’t just gaining strategic insights, it’s also protecting its own rear end. But it also isn’t as simple as currying favor — some of the Tour’s inaugural councilmen and women have also been some of its most vocal critics over the last several years.

“Ultimately, this is about the forum,” Weitz said. “This is about creating a place where creators can come together with the Tour, we can learn from each other, and we can do better on behalf of fans.”

The Council might not ultimately yield much in the way of progress. Some issues inherent to the PGA Tour media business, like commercials, are responsible for the vast sums of money the Tour generates. Other issues, like managing the haves and have-nots of PGA Tour media regulations, could prove a considerable headache for Tour brass. But if nothing else, Friday’s announcement points to tangible evidence the Tour is acting to address the most flagrant issues plaguing its existence in the LIV era.

That might not be everything you’re looking for, but it’s something — and right now something is good.

Even if it makes your eyes roll.

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Kevin Kisner named NBC Sports lead analyst after yearlong search

James Colgan — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 17:19:45 +0000

NBC Sports has a new lead voice, and his name is Kevin Kisner.

After a yearlong search, NBC announced Wednesday that Kisner will become the new lead analyst of its golf coverage, ending the revolving door in the lead booth following Paul Azinger’s departure in December 2023.

Kisner, an 18-year PGA Tour pro, will keep limited PGA Tour playing privileges as part of the agreement, allowing him the freedom to play out the remainder of his Tour eligibility while still completing a full-time broadcast schedule. According to an NBC press release, the agreement will see Kisner in the booth for NBC Sports’ coverage of the U.S. Open, Open Championship and Ryder Cup in 2025.

Kisner appeared to be NBC’s preferred choice for the lead role since at least February, when he stepped into the booth for a handful of well-received stints in the lead chair at the Sentry, WM Phoenix Open and Players Championship. The question, it seemed, centered around if Kisner wanted to hand over the final days of his professional playing career to take the job.

The longtime pro told The Hot Mic in January that he had “no plans” to retire for a golf TV job, but acknowledged that the realities of pro golf might eventually push him in that direction. In April, he told The Loop podcast that after further reflection, he’d decided he wasn’t ready to leave pro golf.

“I haven’t played well in two years, and I don’t really want to go out like that, to be honest with you,” Kisner said. “I feel like I can still compete with the guys if I’m playing well, which I haven’t played what I consider well yet. So it’s kind of a test to myself to see, how hard can you work to figure it out?”

Kisner’s indecision appeared to put NBC in a bind. The network parted ways with Azinger acrimoniously just months earlier after five up-and-down years, and (perhaps smartly) wanted to avoid rushing to name a replacement. As such, NBC waited until May to announce Brandel Chamblee as lead analyst for its biggest broadcast of 2024, the U.S. Open, and Luke Donald for its second-biggest broadcast, the Open Championship. As part of those announcements, NBC said it would spend the remainder of 2024 experimenting with a series of lead voices under a new “odd-even” telecast structure. Based on the hole number, the new structure would alternate broadcasting duties between two sets of analysts and play-by-play broadcasters.

NBC Sports executive producer and head of golf production Sam Flood said then that the network could — and likely would — wait until the offseason to hire a full-time voice.

“I think if we find the right person [we’ll hire someone full-time],” Flood said. “But right now, we think for the audience, they’re benefiting by hearing all this different perspective. And it’s kind of fun every week to figure out who’s going to be on and how it all meshes together. For the rest of this year, we’ve got this going on — but who knows what’s going to happen next year?”

With Wednesday’s announcement, Kisner becomes just the third full-time lead analyst for NBC since the Clinton Administration, stepping into a role long dominated by major championship winners (which Kisner is not). Rather, the 40-year-old pro and four-time PGA Tour winner will look to define the next generation of golf broadcasters, leaning on his well-regarded sense of humor, relationships with pro golfers and familiarity with social media to ingratiate himself to a new generation of golf fans.

By keeping his PGA Tour privileges, Kisner could theoretically change his broadcasting schedule considerably with a victory. But playing in events could also allow Kisner to serve a role similar to longtime CBS Sports analyst Gary McCord, who spent the formative years of his broadcast career pitching into CBS telecasts on weekends following missed cuts.

“If I won next week, I’d probably be like, ‘alright, I might be done.’” Kisner said in April. “I just want to prove to myself that I’m not going out like this.”

According to the press release, Kisner will slide next to longtime NBC Sports play-by-play voice Dan Hicks in the lead chair in 2025. Over the summer, Flood expressed his desire to bring back Hicks, who was on an expiring contract in 2024. Now, it seems, Hicks is back in the play-by-play chair, and with a new partner to boot.

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Lexi Thompson's NBC complaints raise bigger LPGA TV questions

James Colgan — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 18:27:16 +0000

Welcome back to another extended edition of the Hot Mic Newsletter, GOLF’s weekly send covering all things golf media from me, James Colgan. Subscribe here to get stories like this sent directly to your inbox.

The Bitter End rarely looks pretty in golf. But at least for most, The Bitter End looks the same: A walk up the 18th fairway at the season-ending tournament, a chance to wave the fans off one last time, a final putt and a last-ever ovation.

On Sunday at the CME Group Tour Championship, this was the cause of frustration for retiring star Lexi Thompson. In what may very well be her final LPGA event — at least her last as a full-time player — she wanted the chance to send her career off in the traditional way, to see the 18th hole the way she had likely spent the better part of the last several months envisioning. But when she left the course on Saturday evening and received the following day’s tee times, she confronted an odd bit of news. In order to fit the LPGA’s broadcast window with NBC, the tour decided to split the weekend tee boxes, sending half of Sunday’s 60 players off on the first tee box, and half off on the 10th.

Given that Thompson found herself in the bottom half of Sunday’s field, the news meant her professional career would end in a harumph. The ninth green, not the 18th, would welcome her last-ever ovation, and fewer fans would be there to witness it all.

PRETTY SAD

“Pretty sad when you’re at -4 in the season-ending event, which could easily be the last CME of your career and you won’t even finish on #18 because they decide to double tee on the final day due to TV coverage window,” Lexi posted in an IG story on Saturday evening, voicing her displeasure. “Bummed I won’t be able to embrace all the incredible fans on 18 tomorrow as I finish. Hopeful some will be out there on #9. But just know I’m grateful for you all.”

SOP

The post raised eyebrows almost immediately in the LPGA world, but not for the reasons one might have thought. For one thing, the LPGA has long maintained the practice of splitting tees on tournament Saturday and Sundays in the fall — a function partially driven by glacial pace of play, dwindling daylight hours, and broadcast windows that the LPGA would do well to complete its events within. For another, Thompson’s finish on the ninth green at the CME Group Tour Championship would happen only about 30 yards from the 18th green amphitheater, giving fans ample access to move from one site to the other to send Thompson off properly. And for a third thing, Thompson only finished on the ninth because her 54-hole score of 4 under was more than 10 shots off the lead.

In other words, Thompson’s complaints might have been substantiated (split Sunday tees are still unusual on the PGA Tour), and she might have been rightfully emotional about the end of her professional career, but her complaint was leaving out a lot of relevant context.

OTHER ANGER

The CME Group Tour Championship’s Saturday broadcast also came under fire last week from within the LPGA tent, when CME Group CEO Terry Duffy voiced his displeasure with Golf Channel’s decision to broadcast the tournament’s third round on tape delay.

“That’s bulls**t, isn’t it?” he said in a meeting with reporters before the start of the tournament, adding he hoped LPGA commissioner Molly Marcoux Samaan would “make that not be the case.”

Duffy is no stranger to criticizing the LPGA. His company is one of the tour’s biggest benefactors, but that didn’t stop him from calling out a lackluster showing from LPGA stars at last year’s CME Group Tour Championship dinner. This year, the topic was TV rights, an area Duffy hoped — as many golf fans do — that common sense would eventually prevail.

“I would hope that people would recognize that if you’re going to continue to build women’s sports, you have to give them the same billing as men,” he said. “Stop — stop — the nonsense of saying that, well, we have to show a men’s tournament because they’re the men.”

REWIND

A quick refresher: Networks and golf tours set broadcast schedules, or windows, together. It benefits all parties when the most dramatic moments at tournaments are televised, so networks will often work to make sure events are completed within the broadcast window.

Sunday at the CME Group Tour Championship had added broadcast significance to both parties. NBC was airing the action, a national network with viewership often 10x that of the Golf Channel, and the LPGA had an out-time in the early evening, with an all-important Sunday Night Football broadcast set to begin as the NFL’s 4 p.m. games concluded.

These things together contributed to NBC setting a 4 p.m. end time to the CME Tour Championship telecast, which contributed to the LPGA’s decision to split the Saturday and Sunday tee boxes, which contributed to Thompson’s frustration.

WHY

The bigger question facing the LPGA/NBC debate, though, is why? Pace of play and TV exposure have ballooned into growing issues on the LPGA, and Thompson’s frustration underlined the ways the two problems often dovetail.

On one hand, the tee time decision showed the LPGA operating in favor of TV exposure, working to ensure a compelling broadcast filled the airwaves during one of the rare moments of nationwide exposure. On the other, though, it showed the extent pace of play issues affect the week-to-week product of the LPGA, in this instance casting doubt that 20 threesomes of professional golfers could complete their rounds between sunrise and 4 p.m.

DOES IT *REALLY* MATTER

In most instances, no: The LPGA won’t run into many issues operating in the best interests of TV partners. But at the same time, failure to address the underlying issues facing the tour’s telecasts almost certainly undermines the LPGA product. Just last week, Charley Hull outlined her “ruthless” slow-play solution to cheers from some within the women’s game — “If you get three bad timings, it’s a tee shot penalty. If you have three [penalties], you lose your Tour card.”

Is such a dramatic step necessary to rectify the problem of six-hour rounds on the LPGA? Perhaps not. But operating from the current position to appease the playing class has kept purses growing at the cost of discontent among nearly everybody else. A growing women’s game seems to be the goal of broadcasters, sponsors and players alike, but too often those parties have failed to meet even some of the lower thresholds for boosting entertainment value and viewer interest.

It seems it’s past time for somebody to outline a solution.

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