The TGL is officially off the ground, and the same can be said for its TV ratings.
Golf’s brand-new simulator league aired to 919,000 average viewers on ESPN on Tuesday night, a robust but not earth-shattering total for its first-ever telecast, according to SBJ’s Austin Karp and first reported by the X (formerly Twitter) handle @YeahClickClack. Notably, the TGL telecast was up by 200,000 average viewers over the same time slot a year ago and attracted a larger audience than its lead-in, the Pitt-Duke basketball game, indicating golf fans tuned to ESPN specifically to watch the new league.
If you’re a TV-savvy golf fan feeling somewhat surprised by those numbers — in either direction — we don’t blame you. The TGL’s numbers placed them almost perfectly between the rough averages for LIV telecasts on the CW and PGA Tour telecasts on CBS and NBC. Does that tell us something concrete about the new league relative to its tour counterparts?
The answer is no. TV ratings are inherently subjective, and it’s much too early to compare the TGL to its tour counterparts. The best way to know a league’s success is to compare it against itself, and to control for as many variables as possible. Is the audience growing or shrinking over time? And if so, by how much? Can the audience change be attributed to airing on cable vs. streaming vs. broadcast TV? Of course, change over time is the one data point we don’t have for the TGL, which is part of what will make the next several weeks of ratings reports so critical to its sustained success.
Still, there are things to learn from week 1’s ratings, and I’ll attempt to distill a few of the key takeaways below.
First off, I’d say these ratings qualify as slightly better than expected. On a scale from “smash-hit” to “utter failure,” I’d put the TGL week 1 audience almost squarely in the middle, perhaps trending a few ticks in the positive direction. A few days ago, I predicted in the neighborhood of 700,000 average viewers for the TGL as a solid baseline for week 1, basing that prediction off ESPN’s monthly averages, which hover around 800,000 at this time of year. The TGL benefits from airing in primetime, when the audience size should be much larger. I figured the beneficial timeslot would be canceled out by the league’s novelty and the absence of the league’s most critical stars from week 1, and I felt bearish about the overall number after the first match ended in a blowout. (Ratings are the average number of viewers watching in any one minute of a telecast, and those numbers can be harmed when viewers tune out en masse early because of a blowout, or when viewers lose attention because of a heavy sequence of commercials — two things could have happened in the final hour on Tuesday.)
