If you’ve found yourself complaining about the state of the PGA Tour’s broadcasts over the last several years, give yourself a pat on the back.
Your goals were never “misguided.” You weren’t “shouting into the void.” You helped to create real, actionable change on the PGA Tour; change that will arrive to Tour broadcasts this fall.
At least, that’s the latest according to Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, who gave his latest state-of-the-state press conference on Wednesday at the Tour Championship.
The final event of the PGA Tour regular season was an ideal time to announce a new slate of changes coming to the Tour for the commish. Given Monahan’s unenviable role of reporting no developments (again) in the PGA Tour’s negotiations for peace with the Saudi PIF, a few flashy toys were helpful, if not necessary, in settling an unhappy golf public. And what better topic to announce enhancements for than the quality of the TV broadcasts, which have plagued the Tour for years?
The headline is a new “pilot program” aimed at test-driving some new broadcast enhancements during Golf Channel’s Friday broadcasts from the Tour’s new “fall series.” The program, Monahan said, would rely off of feedback from fans in real-time to offer new ideas, and rate the effectiveness of their suggestions.
“On Thursday, we’ll show fans a traditional broadcast. Then on Friday, the presentation will adopt new features based on fan feedback,” Monahan said. “We’ll then survey fans to test their preferences, and that intel will help us further innovate the broadcasts with our fans more squarely in the driver’s seat.”
At face value, the announcement marks a considerable shift to how the PGA Tour does its business on television, but the reality is a little more complicated. The truth is that stakeholders across the sports world already rely heavily on audience feedback to help generate production decisions; the Tour’s decision just formalizes, and tremendously hastens, those efforts.
The Tour can afford to do this in part because Golf Channel telecasts during the fall season are already some of the smallest audiences of the year, a development expected to continue with the defenestration of the “FedEx Cup Fall” under the new pro golf schedule. If the Tour was hoping only to source feedback from the biggest of the diehards, well, those watching during Thursday and Friday afternoons in the middle of football season would certainly qualify.
“I think what we’ve heard from fans and what we’re working with our partners at Golf Channel to test, a couple of the themes that you may see us address, number one, being able to see more shots and potentially fewer putts,” Monahan said. “You’ll see a number of other broadcast innovations that we’ll continue to test as we go forward.”
