Most of the time, TV ratings require nuance.
Anyone can read the numbers, but the numbers don’t always tell you everything you need to know. A favorable time slot, pre-broadcast audience tailwinds, or a lack of alternative options can boost a good rating in much the same way a scheduling snafu, extra opponent, or changed timezone can influence a bad one.
But the numbers from this weekend’s professional golf tournaments — the LIV individual championship and the PGA Tour’s Procore Championship — need no such context. They were bad by any objective measure, raising the latest warning of a TV audience exodus driven by years of division and confusion in the pro game.
We’ll start with the PGA Tour, which recorded 69,000 average viewers during Sunday’s final round at the Procore Championship in Napa, less than a quarter of the audience that tuned into Sahith Theegala’s final round victory in the same event last fall.
The Procore Championship (formerly the Fortinet Championship, Safeway Open and Frys Open) was not aided by the same Netflix star-winner support it received in ’23. Instead, PGA Tour journeyman Patton Kizzire seized a five-shot win over a light field. The final round aired opposite the NFL on Golf Channel, which reaches a far smaller audience than most traditional PGA Tour broadcasts on NBC and CBS. Still, the final number was paltry even by Golf Channel’s diminished viewership standards, considering it ranked beneath the August average for a Golf Channel telecast of any kind (76,000).
Kizzire’s win kicked off a FedEx Cup Fall Season refashioned by the PGA Tour to serve as a feeder series for the big tour. The Tour shifted away from its “wraparound schedule” to amplify its biggest events during the spring and summer months when sports TV competition is comparatively light. But the downside of that shift is that it risks ceding the fall months to the NFL and college football entirely — a change that could further harm the rest of the Tour’s diminishing TV ratings.
The situation was just as dire across the street at LIV, where only 89,000 average viewers tuned into Sunday’s final round of the league’s individual championship in Chicago, less than one-third of the 286,000 viewers that tuned into the league’s first event on the CW in Mexico last February.
LIV’s ratings were closer to its averages, but the league didn’t have the PGA Tour’s built-in challenges of a journeyman winner, a weaker point in its yearlong schedule or an event that aired exclusively on cable. Rather, LIV’s averages — which fall safely below the August averages on such cable channels as Great American Family, Disney Junior and Up TV — came from the final round of what might be its biggest event of the year, with one of the league’s highest-priced stars claiming a big-money victory on the league’s typical broadcast network home, the CW.
