Rich or poor, it’s nice to have money — and whether you’re the NFL’s mega-billions or the slightly smaller billions from the golf tour now run by Roger Goodell’s right-hand man, it’s nice to know that your business is trending in the right direction.
As the golf world turns its attention to the FedEx Cup Playoffs, the folks at the PGA Tour and CBS can claim a dose of optimism on both fronts.
With CBS’s duties as PGA Tour broadcast partners complete for 2025, the network released a promising batch of overall data from the year in golf. In a release distributed earlier this week, CBS reported a 17 percent year-over-year bump in average audience for its PGA Tour telecasts, the best year of Tour viewership on the network since 2018. According to the network, CBS Golf delivered 2.969 million average viewers in 2025, a jump that all-but-erases the viewership plunge of 2024 and confirms the undercurrent of optimism that flowed from CBS golf broadcasts for most of the 2025 season.
If you pay attention to matters of TV ratings, you weren’t surprised by CBS’s announcement. Fourteen of 19 final-round PGA Tour telecasts on CBS posted year-over-year ratings gains from 2024, with many landing audience gains of double digits over the previous year. If the underlying data wasn’t compelling enough, CBS also welcomed an encouraging trend of winners on the course, with the 2025 season led by victories from the Tour’s two biggest stars — Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler — on several of its biggest weeks of the year, including the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Memorial Tournament.
The news arrives as a welcome development for both network and Tour, which weathered a brutal 2024 season underlined by ratings in freefall and an air of general concern about LIV’s detrimental effect on week-to-week tournament golf. But, as with all things TV ratings, there is much more to the numbers than meets the eye — so let’s dive into the biggest takeaways below.
1. CBS Sports’ golf confidence is rewarded
Last year, with the golf TV ratings nearing their lowest point, incoming CBS Sports CEO David Berson surprised me with a vote of confidence for golf.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves when it comes to the ratings stuff,” he told me at the PGA Championship. “It’s early to be worried.”
At the time, I was surprised Berson would go to any lengths to defend the PGA Tour. In my accounting of the Tour Wars to that point, CBS had one of the larger axes to grind: The network had shelled out hundreds of millions for a PGA Tour product that had unexpectedly lost a chunk of its star power two years into a 10-year agreement, and now was struggling through a season with historically low ratings and little hope for reunification.
But ratings be damned, Berson was taking the long view. The Tour’s ratings in mid-2024 were poor, but there was still plenty of reason for enthusiasm about the downstream benefits of the Tour’s newly installed competitive changes, he said. Plus, golf was at a point of post-Tiger flux in the broader sense, with Scottie Scheffler replacing Woods’ dominance but not yet his starpower. In time, Berson suggested, all those changes would even out, and the ratings would rebound.
Fifteen months later, Berson’s confidence was rewarded, and his broader points about the state of the PGA Tour don’t look too bad, either.
Two weeks ago, we wrote about the expected change at CBS headquarters as the network prepared for a major merger with Skydance Productions, operated by the Ellison family. As one of the cash-rich, forward-positioned components of the CBS business, the Sports division remains on notably stable footing heading into the merger. Still, positive ratings reports go a long way in establishing the strength of CBS’s sports portfolio with its new ownership group, including new Skydance CEO David Ellison and his golf-crazed father, Larry.
On Thursday, two days after the golf ratings report, the Skydance/Paramount merger was finalized by the Federal Trade Commission. As we wrote a few weeks back, we expect the CBS Sports division to remain a major piece of the new-look Paramount, but it was telling that CBS’s ratings release included a line about streaming growth — that is one area that should be a focus under the new regime.
3. What’s good for the goose…
For years, the prevailing sentiment from the Tour’s American TV partners was that you could either have more money or a better TV product, but not both. That no longer seems to be the case.
CBS’s golf rebound under the leadership of producer Sellers Shy is well-documented, but changes to NBC and research done by the PGA Tour both appear to have improved the overall golf-viewing experience in 2025 at very little cost to advertisers.
There’s still obvious room for improvement, but for the first time in several years, the simmering tensions between golf’s viewers and its broadcasters appear to have eased.
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4. Fan … forward?
Fan Forward, the Tour’s much-celebrated fan survey, produced lots of actionable learnings for golf telecasts in 2025, including a deeper focus on cutline stories and a shift away from tap-in putts. In the big picture, the Tour hoped that small improvements to the telecasts would help fans feel more connected to players, which would result in bigger, more devoted audiences. But in the much smaller picture, the changes executed from the survey were more about doing what could be done to improve Tour broadcasts rather than focusing all of the Tour’s energy on what couldn’t (reducing commercials).
Of course, nobody believes that Fan Forward is to thank for the ratings boost in 2025, but the underlying thesis of searching out and implementing fan-recommended improvements seems to have yielded some positive changes for golf.
5. Nielsen Matters
Nielsen’s tweaks to its ratings methodology over the years have been responsible for many of the year-to-year vacillations in sports TV ratings, and it’s likely that the ratings giant is playing at least some role in the Tour’s rebound in 2025.
Nielsen’s goal has always been to capture the most accurate sample of the American viewing audience, though changes to viewing habits and attitudes have made that job harder over time. Golf, with its long broadcasts and older viewing audiences, has long been one of the harder samples for Nielsen to capture (a thorn in the side of many TV execs). Nielsen changes in 2025 to incorporate more out-of-home viewing likely helped golf’s overall viewership bump to some unknowable degree, though there is reason for optimism that the changes were unlikely to account for all of CBS’s 17 percent ratings bump.
In other words, the news is still good for golf’s TV partners … just maybe with a friendly boost from the ratings collectors.
