The tactical reason why Tiger Woods ISN’T playing in the first TGL match

After many months of waiting, Tiger Woods’ golf league has a week 1 schedule.

The strange part?

Tiger Woods isn’t on it.

Huh?

Yes, when the action begins in the brand-new TGL from the brand-new SoFi Center in West Palm Beach in January, it will feature a matchup between neither of the league’s biggest stars: New York Golf Club (belonging to Xander Schauffele, Cam Young, Matt Fitzpatrick and Rickie Fowler) and The Bay Golf Club (Ludvig Aberg, Wyndham Clark, Min Woo Lee and Shane Lowry). Neither Woods nor Rory McIlroy will participate in week one, which will be broadcast on ESPN at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, January 7 — a decision that leaves the simulator-focused golf league to debut to the world under a group of well-liked but not quite needle-moving stars.

We forgive you for your confusion. Wasn’t the whole point of the new league to increase Tiger Woods’ television presence in his post-full-time career? Did the league not grasp the increasingly fleeting attention span of the sports-watching world? Did it not know that Tiger Woods was a crucial piece of the league’s long-term audience success, or did it just not care?

As it turns out, the answer is much more sensible than it seems.

While the league still has every hope of delivering a high-entertainment, big-audience week 1 telecast, the TGL placed Woods’ first competitive appearance in week 2 for a very tactical reason: The NFL.

The TGL’s week 2 broadcast — which will feature Woods’ Jupiter Links GC against Collin Morikawa’s LAGC — has the benefit of a rare gift in sports television: NFL promotion. The telecast will air on Tuesday, January 14 at 7 p.m. on ESPN, exactly one day after the NFL’s final wild card weekend game airs on the same network and in the same timeslot.

Sure, a 7 p.m. Tuesday window isn’t exactly a dream slot during a loaded stretch in the sports calendar, but it’s a primetime television window at a time when many sports fans will be uniquely attuned to their televisions. What’s more: the broadcast airing a day after the NFL gives the TGL what figures to be a full evening of Tiger promotion to one of the largest television audiences of the sports year.

In other words, the Tiger decision aims to deliver the league’s biggest star at the moment its TV audience will be largest. That makes a lot of sense from a business and competitive standpoint. More importantly, though, it shows the TGL understands the biggest obstacle facing the league in year 1: converting its early viewers into fans.

There are other, similarly big TV challenges for the TGL’s inaugural season. Like establishing viewing habits during a schedule that bounces around days, networks and timeslots; cultivating a sense of allegiance among teams that will never play home games in front of the cities they represent; and delivering a high-entertainment viewership experience in front of an audience of only 1,500 or so. But these challenges all speak to a common throughline that Tiger’s week 2 debut attempts to address: for a sports league, TV viewership is currency.

Thankfully, for Tiger Woods, TV viewership is all but a given. At least, that’s what the last 25 years of golf TV’s viewership data tells us. The hope is that the same holds true with a new pro golf product in 2025.

For once, that means Tiger coming second. But with the TGL, that might be a good thing.