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PGA Tour golf is coming back to the worldwide leader’s main channel.

On Monday morning, the PGA Tour announced that first and second round coverage from this week’s Farmers Insurance Open will be aired on ESPN’s linear cable network in addition to the Tour’s typical broadcasts on ESPN+, Golf Channel and CBS.

The announcement makes the Farmers Insurance Open the first golf tournament to air on ESPN in nearly two decades and opens the door for the Tour to expand its televised hours on one of America’s largest and most influential cable networks. It also juices the audience and reach for one of the most highly anticipated PGA Tour appearances in some time: five-time major champion Brooks Koepka’s return after nearly four seasons with LIV Golf.

According to a person with knowledge of the Tour/ESPN agreement, the broadcast “expansion” to ESPN’s cable channels is not a new agreement between the two parties, and will not reap the Tour an additional rights fee. Rather, the move is a one-week “test” in addition to the Tour’s outstanding ESPN+ agreement. The ESPN broadcast will be a simulcast of the ESPN+ feed, will go off the air before Golf Channel’s broadcast kicks in each evening, and is currently scheduled only to cover this week’s Farmers Insurance Open, though both sides could work to find a pathway to make the relationship a more permanent arrangement, should all go according to plan.

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In other words, the money will stay the same, but the audience reach will dramatically increase for the Tour — a strategy that fits in line with new Tour CEO Brian Rolapp’s grander views about live sports. In his previous job at the NFL, Rolapp spearheaded an NFL media strategy that obsessed over reach and consequence, sometimes at the expense of money — an approach rooted in the theory that a large, captive audience was the key to world dominance.

Historically, the Tour has taken a slightly more restrictive view of its media rights, reaping as much value as possible for every second of live action sold. The ESPN tryout flies in the face of that belief, though it does present a win-win upside for the Tour and ESPN: The Tour can claim better ratings and a larger share of viewership during an early-week window when it otherwise wouldn’t be on TV; and ESPN can claim some free programming to fill its airwaves … with the added benefit of showcasing Brooks Koepka’s return to the PGA Tour exclusively.

Officially, the event is the first for the Tour on ESPN since the network ended its relationship with the Tour after the WGC-Barbados World Cup in 2006. Golf Channel has covered the majority of the PGA Tour’s early-week coverage in recent years, though ESPN reentered the pool of Tour broadcast partners at the turn of the decade when it signed an agreement to carry early-day streaming coverage on ESPN+.

The Tour’s current round of TV rights agreements runs through the end of the decade, and its partners at CBS, ESPN and NBC pay the Tour an estimated $750 million per year. ESPN pays the Tour around $100 million per year for the right to air PGA Tour Live on ESPN+, but also holds deals to air early week coverage of the Masters and PGA Championship, and is the exclusive broadcaster of the TGL.

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The post The secret truth of the ESPN-YouTube TV feud appeared first on Golf.

The post The secret truth of the ESPN-YouTube TV feud appeared first on Golf.

It didn’t take long after the first week of football blackouts on YouTube TV for sports fans to adopt a conspiratorial bent.

“ESPN is trying to make us think this is YouTube TV’s fault, when they’re actually just trying to add new subscribers to their new standalone DTC app,” a now-viral post from the X account @JoshOnAir reads. “Unbelievable. Don’t fall for it people. ESPN / Disney are the worst.”

@JoshOnAir’s opinion was parroted in a handful of viral posts that only seemed to gain steam over the weekend, as consumers missed out on three days’ worth of college and pro football on ESPN networks. It was easy to understand the frustration: Sports fans were missing out despite their role as dutifully paying customers, while the suits at YouTube TV and Disney haggled over shekels in a stalemate with no end date in sight.

Before long, the arguments fell across familiar political lines: Greedy corporations exploiting the common man, profits stolen with little concern for consumers, and the continued enshittification of yet another valued institution.

But there was a problem. These arguments were largely … untrue. The stalemate between ESPN and YouTube TV wasn’t about ESPN’s efforts to remove itself from cable TV, but about ESPN’s still considerable desire to remain on cable. The network was holding onto an inconvenient secret about its business, and the showdown with YouTube TV provided a glimpse behind the curtain.

——

More than any show or talking head, ESPN’s success can be traced back to a single holy grail: For every viewer who tunes in, ESPN gets paid twice.

First, advertisers pay ESPN for the right to air commercials, and second, cable providers pay ESPN for the right to air the network. This second payment is called a “carriage fee,” and it amounts to around $10 per subscriber per month — an enormous coup responsible for much of ESPN’s profitability over the last three decades.

Carriage fees are operated on a contractual basis, and need to be renegotiated every few years, which is what led to the current stalemate between YouTube and ESPN. According to YouTube TV, ESPN is asking for too much from its next set of carriage fees, while according to ESPN, YouTube TV wants a better rate than any of its cable TV counterparts.

As with most corporate disputes, the truth lies somewhere between, and is overshadowed by a much larger reality: The cable TV model is collapsing. Today, cord-cutting has made the cable business resemble the newspaper business of 30 years ago: Still profitable, but steadily losing ground. The latest estimates place standard pay-TV bundles in 65 million homes, down from more than 105 million in 2010.

For ESPN, the downside of that shift is potentially cataclysmic. The network has been backed into a corner: Either raise the cost of carriage fees consistent with the decline in cable customers, or find a way to recoup that money directly from consumers.

That rock-and-hard-place leads us into today’s rock-and-hard-place: Where ESPN has launched its own direct-to-consumer app allowing sports fans to pay $30 per month for an all-access pass to the network, and where a feud with YouTube TV over increased carriage fees has spilled out into the open.

If you find yourself thinking, doesn’t this feud help ESPN launch its new product, speeding the eventuality of cable TV’s demise? Well, you’d be correct. Except for one key point: ESPN doesn’t want its customers fleeing cable TV for a $30/month app. In an interview on Peter Kafka’s brilliant Channels podcast last month, ESPN CEO Jimmy Pitaro laid out the issue plainly.

“If you access us directly, the biggest problem we are going to have is churn,” Pitaro said. “If you go back to the [cable] ecosystem, you don’t have much of a churn problem. It’s really easy for me to turn a streaming service on or off. I do it all the time. It’s much harder for me to do it on cable.”

Pitaro’s point? Every cable subscriber lost for the ESPN DTC app represents a high-risk departure. The goal is to slowly build the DTC audience, eventually creating an ESPN app that provides value to customers for 12 months out of the year, discouraging people from holding their subscriptions only during, say, football season.

In Pitaro’s view, the goal of the new app is to pull from the 60 million people who have left cable in the last two decades, not the 65 million who remain, because the 65 million who remain present a low-risk path to billions in revenue in the short term.

“We’ve wanted to protect [traditional cable],” Pitaro said. “By the way, we still believe there’s a ton of value in the traditional ecosystem.”

The subtext of this point is hard to ignore. For the time being at least, ESPN needs cable providers at least as much as cable providers need the network. In the current fight for the latest batch of carriage fees, that sense of leverage might provide YouTube TV with an upper-hand.

Of course, that upper-hand might manifest in several weeks without ESPN on YouTube TV — an ugly outcome that would harm both sides of the carriage fight. But with nearly eight weeks until the next stretch of golf programming on the network — the launch of TGL season two on Dec. 28 — golf fans have plenty of time.

Rest assured, an agreement will be reached, and lots of money will be made. That’s the way the cable business has always worked for ESPN. But those times are changing … and in the long term, that might not be a bad thing for the people paying.

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The post Why the NFL’s ultimate insider is inside the ropes this week appeared first on Golf.

The post Why the NFL’s ultimate insider is inside the ropes this week appeared first on Golf.

The most plugged-in man in the NFL is making his golf broadcasting debut at this week’s Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands.

Adam Schefter broke the news on ESPN’s “Unsportsmanlike” on Tuesday, although at the time saying he was still waiting for a featured group assignment for Thursday morning. ESPN+ has PGA Tour streaming rights, which is where golf fans can find early tournament coverage and featured group streaming well before (and during) the TV broadcast kicks off.

The Travelers Championship is in Cromwell, Conn., not far from ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Conn. And with the NFL in off-season mode, Schefter, who has long been a golf junkie, gets to jump in with the streaming action on ESPN+

According to Golfweek, getting Schefter to contribute to the ESPN+ streaming model has been in the works for months, but it worked out best for everyone’s schedule this week.

Since the original announcement on Tuesday, he’s been assigned to the Rory McIlroy/Keegan Bradley pairing, which teed off at 10:35 a.m. ET on Thursday. (You can follow along here.)

“It’s not like I had to sit down and study Keegan Bradley and Rory McIlroy. I have a pretty good idea of what they’ve done,” he told Golfweek. “People are always like what do you do to get ready for [the NFL] Sunday? I live my life. I kind of live my job. I feel like I kind of live golf Thursday to Sunday.”

You can watch the the ESPN streams of the Travelers Championship here. The first round goes live on Golf Channel at 3 p.m. ET on Thursday.

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With an ESPN+ subscription, you gain access to PGA Tour Live, where you can stream the best PGA Tour events live from wherever you want.

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Welcome to another edition of the Hot Mic Newsletter. To subscribe to get GOLF’s media updates sent directly to your inbox, click here.

DUUUUVAL

Availability isn’t a concern for former players turned broadcasters in most sports. In fact, the problem with most ex-pros is too much free time, not the absence of it.

The opposite is true in golf, where players can compete well into their 50s and where a whole tour exists for those good enough to have golf TV pedigree, the Champions Tour.

This week, that phenomenon will prove a challenge for ESPN, which will start a bullpen game in the lead analyst chair instead of longtime lead analyst David Duval.

Duval will take off this week from ESPN to compete in the Champions Tour’s Regions Tradition, leaving the network down a lead analyst for its second-biggest golf week of the year (behind the Masters).

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BACKUPS

Thankfully, ESPN has a deep bench of analysts to call upon for help. Geoff Ogilvy (a rumored candidate for Kevin Kisner’s NBC job), Curtis Strange and Andy North will work on a rotating basis in the lead analyst chair alongside Scott Van Pelt.

ESPN’s coverage at the PGA Championship — which includes complete first- and second-round action and morning coverage on Saturday and Sunday — has earned high marks over the last several years for its embrace of fans’ desire for more golf shots and better tech. The broadcast is operated by ESPN lead golf producer Mike McQuade, and steered by Van Pelt’s hosting skills.

In the current golf TV rights landscape, ESPN lands a distant third place in terms of on-air hours, behind both NBC and CBS. The truth, though, is that the network’s high-flying style scratches an itch for many golf fans, mirroring many of CBS’s strengths in pacing and brainy analysis.

THE BEST FORM OF FLATTERY…

McQuade’s lead analyst decision, however, mirrors one made by NBC golf head honchos Tommy Roy and Sam Flood in 2024, when the network elected to broadcast the majority of the season with a rotating tryout in the lead chair.

Eventually, NBC settled upon Kevin Kisner as the lead man, and enjoyed the rotating cast so much they stuck to it. Today, NBC’s ‘odd-even’ system divvies hole responsibilities by broadcaster to improve preparation and allow on-air talent to “eavesdrop” on golfers, providing more specific analysis.

ESPN won’t go full odd-even this weekend at the PGA. Instead, the network will rotate lead analysts based on their availability. But the network’s decision shows that NBC’s trial period from 2024 is a good solution in a pinch when analyst availability isn’t what it seems.

ODD TIMES

ESPN did not release the reason for Duval’s PGA Tour Champions departure. The network’s statement indicated that it expects Duval to return for the 2026 PGA Championship at Aronimink in Philadelphia.

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The post TGL announces ESPN broadcast team led by Scott Van Pelt appeared first on Golf.

The post TGL announces ESPN broadcast team led by Scott Van Pelt appeared first on Golf.

Golf’s techiest new league is slowly coming online.

The TGL, a simulator golf league led by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, announced its first broadcast team on Thursday morning, spotlighting the group of TV and digital media pros who will face the challenge of bringing the first-of-its-kind league to life on ESPN in January.

Beloved golf TV voice Scott Van Pelt will lead off the proceedings for the TGL, serving as the broadcast’s “host.” Van Pelt will add the TGL to his current ESPN golf portfolio, which includes the Masters and PGA Championship, though his role for the TGL will resemble his role for ESPN’s Monday Night Football coverage. Van Pelt will host pregame and intermission coverage from his SportsCenter studio in Washington, D.C., a role that will also include some player interviews.

Once the action begins, Van Pelt will hand over broadcasting duties to a pair of fellow Masters and PGA Championship TV voices, Matt Barrie and Marty Smith, who will serve as ESPN’s play-by-play and sideline reporters, respectively. The league has said its broadcasts will aim to provide unprecedented access to the league’s players, including an open line of microphones between those broadcasting the action and those competing within it. That means interesting things for both Barrie and Smith, who will speak to the teams in real time as the action is unfolding.

On the digital side, my GOLF.com colleague Claire Rogers will join NESN Red Sox sideline reporter Jahmai Webster as hosts of the TGL’s second-screen efforts on ESPN+, taking viewers behind the scenes of life on the TGL. Roger Steele, another popular golf creator, will handle emcee duties.

The announcement marks the latest major step toward bringing the TGL to life after its inaugural season was postponed by a generator failure last December. The league, which includes six franchises and 24 PGA Tour players, will bring golf to primetime audiences on Monday and Tuesday nights in the winter months. A custom-built facility named the SoFi Center in Palm Beach, Fla. will house each of the TGL’s competitions, featuring players competing on a giant simulator screen on virtual golf courses designed exclusively for the league. (If you have more questions about the competitive design of the league, you can check out the video explainers on the TGL YouTube page.)

Of course, the broader push of the TGL is to deliver a television product that golf fans will want to watch each week, allowing the league to make money from selling its TV rights. The league has no shortage of institutional support, counting the PGA Tour, the billionaire sports magnates behind the Strategic Sports Group, and corporate partners like Genesis and SoFi among its partners, in addition to Woods and McIlroy. The hope is that the new league will appeal to younger golf fans, including those in cities with increased exposure to simulator golf, giving Woods a platform to play competitively as his PGA Tour career moves increasingly part-time.

Play in the TGL will begin with the league’s first two-hour match on Tuesday, January 7, and will continue on Mondays and Tuesdays through March 25, 2025.

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The post Sports TV just announced a radical change. Here’s what it means for golf appeared first on Golf.

The post Sports TV just announced a radical change. Here’s what it means for golf appeared first on Golf.

It is tempting to say that we’ve reached the end of the streaming revolution. After Tuesday morning, at least, the heads of three major sports TV power players would be compelled to agree with you.

After all, on Tuesday morning, those three sports TV behemoths announced a sparkling new (yet all too familiar) business strategy: Cable.

The three networks — Disney (owners of ESPN), Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery — didn’t say it quite that clearly. But the announcement that their sports properties would soon be bundled under a new company and offered to audiences at a higher price point didn’t leave much room for PR spin. The truth appeared obvious: television’s era of great unbundling was officially over. Instead of networks offering standalone products at a lower price point to users and letting them choose the winners, the networks realized that combining their products under one mighty conglomerate and sharing the profits had the best — or at least equal — earnings potential.

In an instant, a decade of fracture in the television landscape bubbled to the surface. At the beginning of the streaming revolution, networks had promised viewers that a brighter, more democratic TV future lay ahead. Now, those same networks seemed to be suggesting that the best future involved the same kind of bundled, higher-cost option that had caused the revolution in the first place.

But what if it wasn’t quite that simple?

The truth is that, yes, things with the new Disney/WBD/Fox product look a lot like they did in 2008. The New Bundle (or NB, as we will henceforth call it) will allow viewers to pay one larger fee — rumored to be around $50 per month — to access the three media giants’ near-complete suite of sports programming, just like a classic cable sports bundle. That’s access to more than half of the registered sports TV rights in the United States, including pieces of the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, college football, college basketball and pro golf, all for a few bucks less than the cheapest cable TV sports option. The NB will be owned equally by all three parties but operated by a separate, standalone entity that has yet to be named. Once again, the networks will share a piece of the TV revenue pie — even though some (ESPN, Fox) will be contributing higher-value entities to the pot.

For golf, the implications are notable. Four considerable golf products will be included under the new bundle: ESPN+’s tremendous PGA Tour Live streaming coverage, ESPN’s Thursday and Friday Masters coverage, ESPN’s Thursday and Friday PGA Championship coverage, and WBD’s coverage of The Match. The remainder of golf’s major championships, PGA Tour, Ryder Cup and LIV coverage will not. Those products, which are aired on CBS and NBC primarily, would require additional subscriptions or costs for the consumer to view.

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In some ways, golf shows the primary issue with the NB: it’s not a complete solution. Under the New Bundle, viewers are only receiving a chunk of the sports they desire to watch for 70 percent of the cost of a full cable subscription. But the truth is that the New Bundle’s owners know it’s not a complete solution — that’s why they made it.

Unlike the cable model, which forces many users to sign up for channels they don’t want in order to get the ones they do, the New Bundle comes at a time when nearly every major network (and many major sports properties) offers a direct-to-consumer product. Users who want WBD’s suite of sports programming but don’t want ESPN’s have the option to subscribe to only Max, and users who don’t care about Disney/WBD/Fox but desperately want access to NBC aren’t forced to pay for all four. Why bother pursuing a bundle when direct-to-consumer is the safest (and least corporately murky) path to profitability? Well, because the market forces that brought us to Tuesday’s announcement necessitated a gap solution for the networks — and that seems to be precisely what the NB is.

The creation of the New Bundle is both a symptom and a side effect of a dangerously expensive sports TV economy and a slowly eroding cable TV business. In an era of declining cable subscriptions, sports rights remain one of the few ways to guarantee eyeballs and advertising dollars, which is why they cost so much money. But in an era of declining cable TV profitability, sports rights remain one of the few ways to ensure cable providers will continue paying networks their other, equally important stream of revenue: carriage fees.

Carriage fees — paid by the cable provider to the network on a per-subscriber basis — are a scale-tipper in the sports TV economy because they perpetuate what business folks call “a virtuous cycle.” It works something like this: Audiences want to watch ESPN. Cable providers pay ESPN a carriage fee to have ESPN on their service. ESPN uses carriage fee money from cable providers to buy up all sorts of important sports rights, ensuring its product is even more indispensable to audiences. Because ESPN now owns lots of rights and is totally indispensable to audiences, ESPN can demand an even higher carriage fee from a cable provider, further enriching the network to purchase more sports rights and become more indispensable (and further raising costs on the consumer). This mechanism turned ESPN from a niche cable channel into a global financial engine, and the $10 per subscriber per month the network is believed to receive today from cable providers is a not insignificant piece of Disney’s overall financial outlook. The problem with carriage fees, though, is that they require cable subscriptions, and that’s the side of the television business that’s gone into freefall in the past decade.

All this has brought the networks inching closer to the proverbial rock-and-a-hard place. With the cost of sports rights ballooning, networks need more money from advertising and carriage fees just to break even, and with the number of cable subscribers plummeting, the latter source of income is dwindling. Eventually, execs hope, the cost of their own direct-to-consumer products will be enough to bridge the gap. But with ESPN still another year away from its DTC platform (reportedly ringing in at $30/month) and the slow growth of the medium more generally, the networks realized they needed a safer hand. This is what led to Tuesday morning’s announcement, and what will bring executives at Disney, Fox and WBD into the same board room for the considerable future: safety.

It is no coincidence that the cost of the New Bundle is believed to be tied directly to the cost of each network’s carriage fees, because that’s precisely why it was created. The New Bundle is a way to turn — or at least slow — the tide of lost carriage fees, allowing each of the networks involved to make up a chunk of the money lost by cord-cutting while their direct-to-consumer businesses grow. Perhaps sports fans will find it entirely more palatable than the individualized solution brought about by the great unbundling, at which point the New Bundle could become a vision of the future. More likely, though, is that the NB will provide those making the transition from cable to streaming with an option that lowers the risk of a bubble event for the networks in the meantime. In this reality, the NB, then, should be viewed not as an effort at recreating the cable wheel but as an attempt at patching up a sizeable hole in the side wall.

There are still many details to parse out from the NB — cost, availability, tech, leadership, governance and the downstream effects on viewership data in an increasingly volatile ad market, to name only a few — but there is no questioning the motives behind it are different than the ones that brought us to cable. Unlike the cable behemoths, the networks would surely rather not split the cost of subscription revenues, just as Bob Iger (Disney), Jimmy Pitaro (ESPN), Lachlan Murdoch (Fox) and David Zaslav (WBD) would much rather spend their board room time building a business that isn’t 66.66 percent someone else’s. But strained times require strange solutions, and with more than $200 billion expected to be outlayed for U.S. sports rights over the next decade, there’s little doubt these are strained times in sports TV.

There’s good news, though, for the sports leagues involved (there almost always is). The New Bundle opens the possibility for a new paying sports audience, assuming all parties remain on their own, and that could make the next round of sports TV rights even more profitable for the leagues on the selling side (which is perhaps why the leagues “blindsided” by Tuesday’s announcement weren’t immediately all that upset about it).

In some ways, yes, we have reached the end of the sports streaming revolution. But if you asked those involved in creating the New Bundle, they’d correct you quickly. We’ve reached the end … of the beginning — and there’s a whole lot more where this came from.

The author welcomes your thoughts at james.colgan@golf.com — and encourages you to sign up for the Hot Mic newsletter below.

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The post Why the PGA Tour’s ESPN+ deal could prove a key weapon against LIV appeared first on Golf.

The post Why the PGA Tour’s ESPN+ deal could prove a key weapon against LIV appeared first on Golf.

Through one year at least, the PGA Tour and ESPN+ have proven a very good match.

According to data released by the two parties, the streaming network and Tour have both seen strong gains through the first season of their 9-year, $685 million agreement. Growth was seen most prominently in viewership, where PGA Tour live coverage on ESPN+ was streamed by more fans than any other live content on the platform from January through August of this past year. The Tour’s first year on ESPN’s paid-subscription platform also coincided with a 42 percent increase in ESPN+ subscribership, and a 14 percent jump in overall Tour digital platform growth.

The data surely rings as welcome news at PGA Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., where officials gambled that shepherding the Tour’s digital media rights away from the golf-specific “PGA Tour Live” platform would prove both profitable and audience-expanding. The Tour’s shift toward a newer, bigger audience on ESPN+ was based primarily on the hope that both hardcore golf fans and casual sports fans would funnel toward a more widely available Tour streaming product — a hope that has proven true through at least year 1.

“Our goal entering the long-term partnership with ESPN was reaching more fans and providing them with more content,” Luis Goicouria, the Tour’s SVP of Media said through a spokesman. “We’re thrilled with what we accomplished in the first year and how our fans have embraced the ESPN+ platform.”

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In seizing a prominent place in the ESPN+ platform and a sizeable production investment (tripling the number of streaming hours from the previous year), the Tour bet its product would thrive even on an ESPN+ platform growing increasingly crowded with other sports properties. That to this point it has been successful is a meaningful development — particularly as the Tour undergoes changes just a handful of years into a separate multi-billion-dollar pact with Discovery — but it might not be the only one. In addition to being good for the bottom-line, the ESPN+ deal might have the unintended benefit of helping the Tour to supplant its own standing in the golf world against LIV Golf.

Back in June when LIV Golf first burst onto the scene, its foray into streaming was no accident. Without a viable TV or streaming deal in place, the league moved to the medium that would provide it with the largest possible number of eyeballs: YouTube. In providing its broadcast commercial-free to viewers, LIV made the calculated gamble that its broadcasts would serve as a “proof of concept” for future partners.

But as those who have followed LIV closely know, a broadcast or streaming rights agreement has not come easily. After beginning the year with only a small number of potential partners — due in part to the PGA Tour’s own movements to sign broadcast contracts with most large media conglomerates — the list has dwindled even further, with big players like Amazon and Apple backing away from the bargaining table.

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As LIV heads into the new year without a broadcast contract, the Tour’s first season on ESPN+ would only seem to harm those efforts further — not only in terms of shortening the league’s list of potential suitors but also in terms of the growth potential those suitors may see in LIV. With the PGA Tour owning the lion’s share of one of the sports world’s largest streaming properties, spending millions with LIV suddenly becomes a less attractive prospect. Goicouria went as far as to connect those dots himself in his statement, pointing to 2022’s streaming success as evidence of the Tour’s superiority in the space. (“We see the success of PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ as a reflection of the Tour being the most competitive platform in golf that showcases the biggest moments in golf,” he said.)

Of course, ESPN+ is just a small piece of the PGA Tour’s overall media portfolio — an audience-base that was old and homogenous enough to participate in LIV’s creation in the first place. But it is a particularly meaningful piece of that portfolio in the latest phase of the Tour’s battle against LIV; a battle that will be determined in large part, fairly or not, by the upstart’s ability to find a viable media partner.

There is still much that remains to be seen in golf’s great tour wars, but there is no question who will be easier to see in 2023. To that end, the advantage goes to the PGA Tour — with an assist to ESPN+.

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The post Artsy ESPN camera shot of Tiger Woods putt agitates golf fans appeared first on Golf.

The post Artsy ESPN camera shot of Tiger Woods putt agitates golf fans appeared first on Golf.

It has become a familiar sight whenever Tiger Woods is on the scene at a golf tournament: herds of fans tracking his every swing, step and smile through the lenses of their phones.

If you were watching the second round of the PGA Championship from Southern Hills on ESPN on Friday, you saw just such a scene on the par-5 13th hole, where Woods had a short birdie try. As Woods addressed the putt — one he desperately needed to hole to keep alive his hopes of making the cut — an armada of phones appeared, cameras whirling. One fan with a ring on his left pinky raised his arms to get a clean shot of Woods. We know this because an ESPN camera had zoomed in tightly on the fan’s phone.

It was a meta moment that, in a way, symbolized the magnifying glass under which Woods lives: a camera shooting the world’s most photographed golfer through the lens of another camera. Heavy stuff, right? You could even see the fan, who was seven or eight rows deep in the gallery, working his own zoom to get the best shot.

But then ESPN did something unexpected: Instead of cutting to a different camera angle that would provide viewers a clean shot of Woods’ birdie putt, the network stayed with the artsy camera-into-camera vantage point as Woods drew back his putterhead and struck the putt (which he made). Bold choice!

Too bold?

If the digital town square we know as Twitter was any indication…yes, far too bold! Among the hundreds of tweets on the topic that this reporter scanned, golf fans overwhelming panned ESPN’s decision to stick with the unconventional camera shot. In fact, many seemed downright offended by it. A sampling of feedback:

“Please don’t ever do this again especially when it’s the most consequential putt of Tiger’s round.”

“Showing a spectator’s phone INSTEAD of the live birdie putt by Tiger …. is reprehensible!!!!”

@BaySportsTeetr really let ’em have it:

Other observers seemed more upset that fans on site were watching Woods through their phones instead of through their own eyeballs. To wit:

“How about actually watch[ing] the moment instead of worrying about your phone video that everyone else will have a copy to post on YouTube?”

To be fair, not all Twitterers resented the shot. A small minority appreciated ESPN’s avant-garde approach:

“Incredible camera work!!” one fan wrote. “Stayed focused on Tiger’s birdie putt through a spectators phone. Amazing.”

Another fan “saluted” the network:

While another found the moment NFT worthy:

Final word goes to @mattkavanagh95, who perhaps said it best:

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If you woke from a coma around 1 p.m. ET on Thursday afternoon and turned on ESPN’s broadcast of the PGA Championship, let us be the first to extend our deepest sympathies.

What you witnessed on your television screen this afternoon was unlike anything you — or anyone — has ever seen during a golf broadcast. It was odd, it was unique and it was decidedly not buttoned-up. It had the tenor of a Twitch stream, the interview lineup of a late-night talk show, and the comedic sensibility of something in between the two.

If the shock of what you witnessed wasn’t enough to make you completely question your grip on reality, witnessing Joe Buck with an ESPN logo underneath his chest likely did the trick.

What you saw was golf’s first-ever “Manningcast” — a new, laid-back style of sports television founded by ESPN in conjunction with the Manning brothers. The broadcast is built to be a kind of sports talk show, with celebrity interviewees and hosts commenting on the action as it happens. It’s a place to share stories, to share laughs, to share pints, and to share a few minutes watching the game with the folks you’ve always wished you could watch a game with.

Here are five lessons we learned from watching a golf broadcast unlike any other.

5 lessons from the PGA Championship Manningcast

1. Joe Buck and golf are still a good marriage

Joe Buck hasn’t been spotted calling a men’s major since the final round of the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, but Thursday proved his golf knowledge makes him a natural fit calling the sport (despite his most sardonic suggestions to the contrary).

Thursday was the long-time FOX Sports broadcaster’s first time in front of the camera since moving to ESPN to call Monday Night Football in January. Of course, ESPN’s golf coverage is limited — on linear television, the PGA and Masters are its only golf properties — but it’ll be interesting to see if ESPN considers leaning on Buck’s golf knowledge heading into the future.

2. ESPN’s biggest names are invested in the format

There’s an inherent awkwardness in having a rival broadcast running parallel to a network’s main feed. Sure, it’s good if the Manningcast does well, but what if it does too well? Could it distract from ESPN’s (routinely stellar) regular coverage?

It says a lot, considering the circumstances, that Scott Van Pelt joined the show for its first segment on Thursday afternoon, welcoming Joe Buck to the ESPN team and ushering in the new broadcast in the process.

“I don’t know if I should be directing people to watch something else besides us, but it’s additive, right?” Van Pelt said on a press conference in the lead-up to the PGA. “It’s just another option of how to watch and enjoy. I’m certain that it’ll be a blast.”

3. The Manningcast meets casual fans where they are

One of the inherent obstacles facing golf in reaching casual fans is that outside of Sunday afternoon, not much of it feels consequential. The Manningcast format — while undeniably disjointed and slow in some moments — gives golf TV a way to meet those fans where they are.

The celebrity and athlete conversations provide an easy incentive to tune in (or engage on social media) and be entertained. There’s less analysis on the PGA Championship’s version of the show than on Monday Night Football’s, but perhaps that’s by design. It all lowers the barrier for casual fans to watch the sport, which isn’t a bad thing.

4. Sometimes, simpler is better

One of the Manningcast’s most charming qualities is its unpretentiousness. Buck called the broadcast from “a bunker,” and talked freely on the air about the possibility of technical difficulties unseating a later interview.

For most of the day, the two men carried the conversation while an audio-free version of the main feed played picture-in-picture next to them.

It was simple, it was easy, the bells and whistles were noticeably absent. Would we want this from my golf broadcasts every week? Definitely not. Were we glad we got it with the Manningcast? Absolutely.

5. Golf TV is still … fun?

Manningcast works because it understands something fundamental about entertainment: authenticity is e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. It’s why Thursday was worth watching, and why we’ll be tuning in again on Friday.

“I think it’s fun,” Van Pelt said. “I happened to see Eli and Peyton last week. I asked Eli, I said, ‘did you enjoy it?’ He said, ‘I really did.’ They realized that all they had to do was be themselves.

I think the biggest mistake that you can make in TV is if you overthink stuff and try too hard. Especially those guys. They had this innate kind of — they’re brothers, who just both happen to have won multiple Super Bowls, not a lot of those around. I think they leaned into that, and that’s what made it so appealing.”

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The post Phil Mickelson drama creates awkwardness for PGA Championship broadcasts appeared first on Golf.

The post Phil Mickelson drama creates awkwardness for PGA Championship broadcasts appeared first on Golf.

Next week, CBS and ESPN will cover more than 250 hours of live coverage from the PGA Championship at Southern Hills. But the bigger question — the one hanging over the heads of the several hundred people from both networks involved in beaming the event to golf audiences across the world — is whether Phil Mickelson‘s name will surface.

It would seem unfathomable for Mickelson, the six-time major-winner and conversational lightning-rod, to find himself left out of the discussion at the very event he so improbably won just 12 months ago. It was just two years ago at the PGA that Mickelson himself was invited into the CBS booth as a guest commentator.

For the better or worse over the last quarter-century, Mickelson has been a staple of major weeks. Before this spring, he had missed only two majors since the mid-90s (the 2009 Open Championship and 2017 U.S. Open), both absences coming due to family conflicts.

But then came 2022, and Mickelson’s now-infamous comments to Alan Shipnuck about the growing Saudi influence in professional golf. Phil stepped away from golf in the blowback from the story, and has not competed since.

In April, Mickelson withdrew from the Masters for the first time in his professional career. Subsequently, he was persona non grata on CBS and ESPN’s broadcasts from that event — his place in the arc of the tournament’s history forgotten for the overwhelming majority of television coverage during tournament week. In press conferences leading up to the tournament, broadcasters and network executives declined comment about Mickelson.

News

Today, the discourse around Mickelson has grown more nuanced. At the PGA Championship, whispers about LIV Golf have turned into full-throated discussions. Mickelson isn’t the only pro entertaining the idea of changing flags — Rickie Fowler was among those at Southern Hills willing to admit he’s at least considering the merits of making the jump to a rival league. Officially, Mickelson won’t be at the PGA Championship, but he’ll certainly be part of the conversation among those on the ground.

The same can’t be said for the networks. At least not yet. In calls leading up to Southern Hills, employees from both ESPN and CBS seemed reticent to discuss Phil, even when asked directly about him.

It’s an odd dichotomy for the reigning winner of one of golf’s major championships to face: simultaneously the story of the tournament, but perhaps not relevant enough to wind up on the television broadcast of it. A paradox distilled perfectly by Jim Nantz, who, on a pre-PGA conference call with reporters, waffled on his own no-comment about Mickelson within 20 minutes of making it.

“You know what? I’m going to keep that private,” Nantz said originally. “I’ve actually communicated with him, and I don’t feel like that’s something that is something that I’m sharing with everyone else. So I’ll leave it at that.”

And then, minutes later:

“He’ll be back,” Nantz said. “He’s got a ton of fans out there. This is a forgiving nation. And there’s a million examples of people that have been able to somehow find their way back to being on top again and I fully expect he will.”

Of course, Nantz isn’t the only person making decisions as to who (and what) is discussed on the air at the PGA. Two networks, two production teams and two sets of broadcasters will face that decision independently. There are also other factors to consider. One is the sponsors and rightsholders who may very well have opinions about Mickelson’s inclusion in event coverage. Another is a cold reality of golf television: It’s hard to find time for players who aren’t there, yes, even defending champions.

“Phil’s situation is a storyline if he plays, and he will have provided us with the context with a press conference at some point prior to,” said ESPN broadcaster Scott Van Pelt. “If he doesn’t play, then I don’t know how much conversation there will be other than he’s not playing. He continues to be away from the game, and certainly that’s something that would — I’m sure would be mentioned over the course of time. But I think the golf would be the central storyline of our coverage because that’s what we’re there to cover is the 2022 PGA Championship.”

Some would call that dissonance. Others, like Nantz, would call it something else.

“Sometimes we get caught up in the cyclone of a story. We think it’s forever,” Nantz said. “It won’t be forever. He’ll be back.”

But will he return to CBS’s airwaves before then? We’ll find out soon enough.

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