Jon Rahm’s LIV Particular person Championship win got here in entrance of a median viewers of 89,000 viewers, per the SBJ.
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More often than not, TV rankings require nuance.
Anybody can learn the numbers, however the numbers don’t all the time inform you every thing it’s essential know. A good time slot, pre-broadcast viewers tailwinds, or a scarcity of different choices can enhance a very good ranking in a lot the identical means a scheduling snafu, further opponent, or modified timezone can affect a nasty one.
However the numbers from this weekend’s skilled golf tournaments — the LIV particular person championship and the PGA Tour’s ProCore Championship — want no such context. They have been dangerous by any goal measure, elevating the newest warning of a TV viewers exodus pushed by years of division and confusion within the professional sport.
We’ll begin with the PGA Tour, which recorded 69,000 common viewers throughout Sunday’s ultimate spherical on the ProCore Championship in Napa, lower than 1 / 4 of the viewers that tuned into Sahith Theegala’s ultimate spherical victory in the identical occasion final fall.
The ProCore Championship (previously the Fortinet Championship, Safeway Open and Frys Open) was not aided by the identical Netflix star-winner help it obtained in ’23. As a substitute, PGA Tour journeyman Patton Kizzire seized a five-shot win over a light-weight discipline. The ultimate spherical aired reverse the NFL on Golf Channel, which reaches a much smaller viewers than most conventional PGA Tour broadcasts on NBC and CBS. Nonetheless, the ultimate quantity was paltry even by Golf Channel’s diminished viewership requirements, contemplating it ranked beneath the August common for a Golf Channel telecast of any variety (76,000).
Kizzire’s win kicked off a FedEx Cup Fall Season refashioned by the PGA Tour to function a feeder collection for the large tour. The Tour shifted away from its “wraparound schedule” to amplify its greatest occasions through the spring and summer time months when sports activities TV competitors is relatively gentle. However the draw back of that shift is that it dangers ceding the autumn months to the NFL and faculty soccer completely — a change that might additional hurt the remainder of the Tour’s diminishing TV rankings.
Impressively, although, the scenario was simply as dire throughout the road at LIV, the place solely 89,000 common viewers tuned into Sunday’s ultimate spherical of the league’s particular person championship in Chicago, lower than one-third of the 286,000 viewers that tuned into the league’s first occasion on the CW in Mexico final February.
LIV’s rankings have been nearer to its (already bereft) averages, however the league didn’t have the PGA Tour’s built-in excuses of a journeyman winner, a weaker level in its yearlong schedule, or an occasion that aired completely on cable. Reasonably, LIV’s averages — which fall safely under the August averages on such esteemed cable channels as Nice American Household, Disney Junior and Up TV — got here from the ultimate spherical of what could be its greatest occasion of the yr, with one of many league’s highest-priced stars claiming a big-money victory on the league’s typical broadcast community residence, the CW.
We’ll level out right here that LIV and the PGA Tour confronted numerous competitors within the sports activities world this weekend, together with a typical bludgeoning from the NFL’s TV behemoth and a pair of in-house rivals, the Irish Open and Solheim Cup. These things little doubt mixed to steal market share from the 2 main professional tour telecasts, however it’s additionally truthful to ask if, even given these headwinds, telecasts from the 2 largest professional excursions on this planet must be able to producing viewership bigger than a mixed 158,000 common viewers.
Tempting as it’s to give attention to these questions, or extra particular points with both league’s tv and aggressive merchandise, one other obviously dangerous batch of rankings raises greater issues in regards to the well being of the game’s TV product extra broadly.
LIV’s intrusion into the game has made execs fabulously rich and infused billions in new funding, however it has value golf many years in public goodwill. Scores of informal golf followers have reported tuning out of professional golf after being angered by the game’s partisan rancor, turned off by its lack of week-to-week star energy, disinterested in its new aggressive codecs or confused by the on-again, off-again state of peace talks between the 2 sides, which have now stretched to fifteen months with none clear options.
Over the past 9 months, executives at each leagues and a number of other networks have slow-walked issues raised in regards to the state of the TV viewers, however the rising variety of questions surrounding sagging rankings underscored a deeper fact: the numbers have been dropping.
“Let’s not get forward of ourselves in the case of the rankings stuff. It’s early to be frightened,” CBS Sports activities chief David Berson instructed GOLF in Might, some extent echoed in later months by executives at NBC, LIV, and extra just lately, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan.
On the finish of the 2024 common season, SBJ’s Josh Carpenter quoted one PGA Tour community companion as having confronted a year-over-year rankings dip of 15-to-17 p.c, far outpacing the dips confronted by different sports activities properties as cord-cutting continues to proliferate.
“I believe once you take a look at 2024, it’s necessary to notice, and I’m going to notice it, that total consumption throughout our platforms in mixture is up,” Monahan mentioned on the Tour Championship final month. “That’s a extremely good signal for the PGA Tour and the engagement that now we have with our followers.”
Consumption knowledge is sweet for optics, however rankings are nonetheless the place sports activities leagues and networks make their cash. The worth of a sports activities TV deal is tied intrinsically to the scale of the viewers and the quantity of commercials offered — with out both, a deal isn’t almost as priceless.
For this reason LIV has struggled to realize a noticeable foothold with advertisers and company companions, and why it has entertained extending its settlement with the CW regardless of those self same viewers improvement struggles. It’s additionally why the PGA Tour is spending the autumn searching for modern options for its telecasts, together with its curious influencer pilot program, the “Creator Traditional.”
None of that is to say that professional golf is headed in a hopeless path, nor that the losses of the final a number of years are unfixable subsequent to the mixed monetary may of golf’s two main professional excursions. It is to say, nonetheless, that the issue of tv rankings in golf is actual, and that every of golf’s stakeholders bears a bit of the accountability.
After the newest batch of rankings, it’s okay to be blunt.
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