The post NBC’s Chevron Championship coverage will have a new lead voice appeared first on Golf.

The post NBC’s Chevron Championship coverage will have a new lead voice appeared first on Golf.

Cara Banks is no stranger to narrating golf’s biggest moments.

If a play-by-play broadcaster is the captain of the golf TV broadcast during the final moments of a tournament, then the interviewer is sort of like first officer. Yes, it’s the play-by-player’s job to land the plane, but it’s the first officer’s job to make sure that it all happens smoothly. To be good in the role of interviewer, you need a play-by-player’s sense of timing and instincts for story selection.

In other words, it’s not that strange that Cara Banks is making the jump this weekend from the role of on-course interviewer, which she has played to great effect at NBC and Golf Channel over the last several seasons, to play-by-play broadcaster, which she will take on at the Chevron Championship this weekend.

On Saturday afternoon, Banks will serve as play-by-player at women’s golf’s first major for the first time, per a report from Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols, stepping into the lead chair for NBC’s coverage of the Chevron.

This won’t be Banks’ first journey into the lead chair — she’s served in a play-by-play role for Golf Channel and NBC’s coverage of several LPGA events over the last calendar year, including the Mizuho Championship — but it will certainly be her biggest role yet. Thanks to an agreement with NBC, Chevron is the beneficiary of five-and-a-half hours of broadcast network TV time over the span of the weekend, making this weekend one of women’s golf’s biggest opportunity to reach oodles of casual TV viewers watching their sports primarily on major network television. Banks will be the person to bring those fans all the action from Memorial Park in Houston, Texas, where she will replace longtime NBC play-by-player Terry Gannon, who is off covering the NBA playoffs for the peacock.

So far, the script couldn’t have played out any better for Banks or the LPGA. At the tournament’s halfway point, the biggest star in women’s golf, Nelly Korda, leads by a country mile, firing back-to-back 65s to lead the rest of the field by a mind-boggling seven shots as of the time of this writing. It’s hard to say exactly how Banks might have drawn up her major championship play-by-play debut, but safe to say the biggest star winning one of the sport’s biggest events was on the list.

Interestingly, should Korda run away with things on the weekend, Banks’ job could get a little bit harder. As many in sports TV production are keen to point out, golf is a different beast on account of its vastness. As opposed to most other professional sports, where there is only one ball and only playing field, golf television takes place over 18 fields, with as many as 72 balls in the air at one time (assuming no backups). In other words, golf on TV is an exercise in controlled chaos, and in a strange way, the orchestra seems to play better when many things are happening at once.

It’s only when the scope of a tournament has shrunk and the storylines have dwindled that the work of a golf play-by-player really begins. And when there’s only one storyline for, say, an entire final round? The primary job is even harder: Keep people interested even when the leaderboard is dull.

Thankfully, Banks’ day job at an interviewer has asked her to flex those muscles plenty over the last several years. She has learned to be a ruthlessly efficient advocate for the viewer, and has sharpened her skills as a narrative builder and selector. Now the only big question remaining is if she has the skills to land the plane.

Rest assured, she’s ready for the challenge.

The post NBC’s Chevron Championship coverage will have a new lead voice appeared first on Golf.

The post The latest Masters TV ratings came with a twist. Here’s why appeared first on Golf.

The post The latest Masters TV ratings came with a twist. Here’s why appeared first on Golf.

Comparison may be the thief of joy, but if you were lucky enough to wind up in the gallery on each of the last two Masters Sundays, it was only natural to spend a little while exploring the parallels.

On each of the last two Masters Sundays, Rory McIlroy stepped to the first tee cast at the center of the gravitational pull of golf’s largest event. On each of the last two Masters Sundays, he endured a final round that featured incredible highs and impressive disaster in equal parts. And, on each of the last two Masters Sundays, McIlroy emerged on the 18^th green at the top of the pack, enjoyed an emotional walk to the scorer’s tent, cruised to Butler Cabin, and slipped his shoulders into a green jacket.

And yet, for all of their spine-tingling similarities, the differences between the two McIlroy wins were even more striking. The crowd on this Masters Sunday seemed excited but not totally euphoric. The winner on this Masters Sunday seemed emotional but not completely overcome. And the larger impact of the victory on this Masters Sunday seemed respectful but not quite earth-shattering.

In nearly all ways, this was perfectly understandable. Rory McIlroy can only end a decade-long epoch in pursuit of major glory once. He can only complete the career Grand Slam with a victory at one of the sport’s holiest sites, Augusta National, once. And he can only deliver a reaction of instant-iconography once.

But then, early last week, the TV ratings came out suggesting something entirely different. According to Nielsen, McIlroy’s 2026 Masters win outrated McIlroy’s 2025 Masters win by a significant margin, delivering 13.995 million average viewers, up eight percent from McIlroy’s win last year.

If you’re like me, you saw those numbers and paused. Nothing about McIlroy’s win this time around suggested the numbers would have outperformed his win from last April, and nothing about the reaction to the victory in the days that followed suggested that TV audiences were salivating for more than they’d gotten last April (when late-night TV spots, morning show hits, a crazed degree of social media fame were fairly standard fare).

So, does that mean CBS has the wrong numbers? Or Nielsen screwed up the ratings? Not exactly.

This year’s Masters numbers come to us courtesy of the new Nielsen Big Data + Panel, a new audience capturing methodology that’s quickly becoming all the rage among sports TV networks and executives. The reason for this is evident in McIlroy’s Masters ratings: Big Data + Panel numbers generally tend to be higher for golf broadcasts than their previous Nielsen counterparts, and higher numbers are good for those who sell advertisements based upon their number of viewers.  

That might sound sketchy, but the reason for it is actually fairly reasonable: By Nielsen’s estimation, Big Data + Panel is a vastly more accurate tool for measuring audiences in the age of modern media, accounting for trends like smart TV watching and streaming. If you are a company like CBS, you rely upon Nielsen ratings to set the profitability of your business, which means you also have a fiduciary responsibility to track the best numbers you can, especially if they just so happen to give your broadcasts an added boost.

For CBS, the decision to report Big Data + Panel numbers might not have drawn any attention at all, had the numbers from McIlroy’s win at the Masters not felt slightly strange relative to the cultural impact of his win a year ago. The Big Data panel is seen among many in the industry as the latest metric in the continued evolution of sports TV ratings in the age of cord-cutting — an effort meant to better understand and capture sports audiences who no longer watch on old-school cable, but still tune in religiously. It’s also quickly become the industry standard, utilized by sales teams across the TV business in negotiating advertising rates and sales opportunities.

Some networks have opted to produce both Nielsen’s old numbers and its new Big Data + Panel numbers, helping to contextualize the difference between the two metrics, but many, like CBS, have opted simply to report the numbers they sell.

In the end, the difference between the two might not matter much at all. For those whose livelihoods depend upon interpreting Nielsen data, the “Big Data bump” is well-trodden terrain by this juncture. And for those whose don’t? A few percentage points in the TV ratings will do very little to change the story of this year’s Masters as you saw it, anyway.

The post The latest Masters TV ratings came with a twist. Here’s why appeared first on Golf.

The post ‘I crossed the line’: Kevin Kisner apologizes for unusual CBS Masters criticism appeared first on Golf.

The post ‘I crossed the line’: Kevin Kisner apologizes for unusual CBS Masters criticism appeared first on Golf.

In the aftermath of Rory McIlroy’s Masters victory, Kevin Kisner made a guest appearance on Barstool Sports’ Fore Play podcast to break down the week that was.

The nearly two-hour conversation covered a lot of bases: Rory’s triumph, Scottie Scheffler and Justin Rose’s near-miss, and other big moments. But when the discussion turned to the broadcast, Kisner went on a viral, profanity-laden rant about what he believed to be CBS’ shortcomings.

“I have a very biased opinion so I want to go ahead and put that out there before I start since I work for the other network,” Kisner began. “And I was so f—ing confused the entire time by trying to keep up with the behind-the-scenes CBS feed. They’re literally showing s— that I knew happened ten minutes ago all day long. It was so bad that I in fact texted Colt Knost during the show and said, ‘Do you all ever show a live shot?’ I’m better off following the f—ing app than following your feed.’”

“So your entire Masters coverage is a fantasy world. It’s bulls–t,” Kisner continued. “Whatever we all watch has already happened seven minutes ago. Could you imagine watching the f—ing Super Bowl and being like, ‘Oh yeah, Tom Brady threw that touchdown seven minutes ago, we’re going to act like it’s live here so our announcers can sound really smart and we’re going to sit here and he’s going to throw it wide open down the middle but it actually happened seven minutes ago and everyone in the stadium’s taking a p—. What are we doing, man?”

Kisner, who became a lead golf analyst for NBC in 2024, was onsite at Augusta National working as a lead analyst for Sirius XM’s Masters broadcast team. Beyond serving as an incendiary bit of post-Masters commentary, his comments were extraordinarily unusual for a man serving as an employee of one of the PGA Tour broadcast partners, who rarely, if ever, air public criticisms of one another.

“You have no commercials,” Kisner said. “Play live shots. I don’t know. Our production team at NBC prides themselves on playing every shot that they possibly can live. And we talk about with Dan Hicks, when we can’t, we have to say a moment ago, because we’re trying to make the whole movie make sense, right? We don’t want to show you a tap-in on 16 and go ‘Oh yeah, he’s already hitting his shot on 17’ because obviously he has to walk over there. I have no idea what they’re doing. Literally no idea. They’re showing every shot on tape. It’s incredible. I don’t even know how the announcers call it.”

On Thursday, Kisner returned to the Fore Play podcast to issue an apology.

“It’s been an interesting few days, but it is what it is,” Kisner said. “I just have to apologize to the the golf team at CBS. I crossed the line probably, too much by talking about that whole content. And I know from my short time in the business how wild production is, right? It is a very difficult thing to produce a live show and make it all work and everybody does their best.

“NBC screws up all the time, and we’re just trying to do our best, and I went too far on being critical on them, and I just want all the people associated with it to know I apologize,” he continued. “They’re our partners with the PGA Tour and they continue to showcase in a great way the game we all love, and they’re all trying to do their best, and I was too critical of them.”

You can watch Kisner’s apology in the video above, or the Fore Play podcast episode in its entirety here.

The post ‘I crossed the line’: Kevin Kisner apologizes for unusual CBS Masters criticism appeared first on Golf.

The post What Amazon Prime has in store for its Masters streaming coverage appeared first on Golf.

The post What Amazon Prime has in store for its Masters streaming coverage appeared first on Golf.

New television partners arrive at Augusta National about as frequently as the United States embarks upon visits to the moon.

In 2026, CBS will celebrate its 71st year broadcasting golf’s first major; ESPN will celebrate its 19th; and a new upstart (and global streaming giant/part of the largest company in the United States) named Amazon Prime will celebrate its first Masters telecast.

By those metrics, Amazon Prime’s addition to the Masters broadcast field for 2026 counts as a news story in its own right. But the streamer’s plans for 2026? Well, those are equally newsworthy, and on Wednesday morning, we received our first glimpse into them.

According to a release distributed by the Masters, Prime Video will broadcast from 1-3 p.m. ET on Thursday and Friday leading into ESPN’s eventual coverage of the opening two rounds.

In addition, Prime will offer a first-of-its-kind stats-based broadcast named Inside Amen Corner, a dedicated feed on Prime Video that will aim to take diehard fans deeper into the action and strategy for the most famous three holes on property at Augusta National — Nos. 11, 12 and 13. Based on the press release’s description, Inside Amen Corner appears to be Prime’s attempt to mimic the “Prime Vision” broadcast that has grown a sincere affection among Thursday Night Football diehards for its endlessly nerdy, delightfully in-depth coverage of the nuances of football. Coverage of Inside Amen Corner will air from 10:45 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET on all four days of the tournament on Prime Video.

Altogether, the changes amount to a new kind of upgrade for the Masters on TV, reflecting the tournament’s ever-evolving mindset toward television and entertainment. For years, Augusta National has existed in a state of superposition: at once broadcasting a classic, timeless look highlighted by limited commercial interruption and now heading full speed into the tech-driven future with a best-in-class app and a full slate of deeply nerdy gadgets and gizmos. The Amazon Prime deal is a reflection of that very same tension, too: Prime’s inclusion at the Masters will bring the tournament to a major streamer for the first time since the start of the cord-cutting phenomenon, but also provides many of the same prestige brand-and-production bonafides that Augusta seeks in each of its major network partners. Even the Amen Corner-dedicated stream reflects the same tension, with a blazing, first-of-its-kind, diehards-only telecast to balance against the more traditional broadcast stream expected of Amazon’s early Thursday and Friday coverage. In all locations and in all ways, the Prime deal aims to prove that the Masters can exist exactly as it has for nine decades … while never staying in one place.

In all, the new Masters partner will exist exactly in the space Augusta National enjoys most of its media offerings: Additive but not suffocating. For those who can’t get enough of the coverage from the ground at Augusta National during the second week in April, that’s certainly not bad news.

The post What Amazon Prime has in store for its Masters streaming coverage appeared first on Golf.

The post 7 noticeable changes arrive to LPGA broadcasts in 2026 appeared first on Golf.

The post 7 noticeable changes arrive to LPGA broadcasts in 2026 appeared first on Golf.

If you’re in the business of sports, you’re really in the business of media — and golf needs to look no further than its newest leadership class to know that is true.

On the PGA Tour, the leader of the flock is Brian Rolapp, Roger Goodell’s former right-hand man at the NFL and the previous head of the league’s prolific media rights business, which made up nearly 60 percent of its $23 billion in 2025 revenue. On the LPGA, the leader is an executive of less rarefied TV bonafides, but with no less commitment to the power of media.

The leader’s name is Craig Kessler, who joined the LPGA a little less than a year ago and has spent the better part of the last 12 months totally reinventing the way the LPGA approaches its audience. At last weekend’s Founders Cup, Kessler’s LPGA unveiled a new series of TV enhancements meant to take those dreams to the next level. The seven biggest of those shifts are listed below.

7 LPGA broadcast enhancements for 2026

1. More hours!!

The biggest shift on TV for the LPGA in 2026 was unveiled long before the Founders Cup, but it bears repeating: Thanks to a partnership with FM, every single round of every single LPGA event in 2026 will feature live TV coverage for the first time ever.

The big expansion in TV hours means the LPGA will have more opportunities for coverage, more eyeballs when its events are in session, and an easier path to impact with the golf audience, which won’t need to jump through hoops to tune into the action.

For years, Rolapp’s NFL playbook involved a strategy of “reach” — or doing everything possible to maximize the number of eyeballs watching each week, even if it came at the expense of a few TV dollars along the way. Kessler is doubling down on that strategy.

2. More cameras

Of course, any expansion to LPGA broadcast hours comes with a handful of expansions to LPGA broadcast equipment. In this case, the cameras are receiving the biggest upgrade, with a 50-percent increase in camera equipment for 2026.

3. More TV goodies

All the tiny details that help add texture and detail to a typical golf broadcast will also be receiving a boost in 2026, including the LPGA’s microphones and slow-motion camera capabilities, each of which received an upgrade in the new year.

4. More drones!

Perhaps the most noticeable visual shift from last year to this one occurred not on the course but in the skies, where an expanded fleet of drones captured a series of dynamic new images during the course of competition.

Drone photography has become a staple of men’s golf broadcasts over the last several years, and improvements in technology have brought down costs and expanded possibilities for broadcast teams. LPGA and Golf Channel investment to these ends shouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s certainly a no-brainer.

5. Shot tracer enhancements

The largest increase between ’25 and ’26 for the LPGA arrived in the graphics department, where the Tour 4x’d its output in shot tracing capabilities thanks to an expanded partnership with TrackMan.

6. Feature storytelling

One way to ensure that your best players’ stories are told? Tell ’em yourself!

The LPGA invested considerably in a series of features-driven programming for 2026 that will run during tournament broadcasts. The first iteration of those features — a look into Rose Zhang’s continuing education at Stanford — was told during Founders weekend.

7. Expanded player access

Another way to ensure that your best players’ stories are told? Have them tell the stories!

The LPGA is expanding its walk-and-talk efforts during the 2026 season as part of Kessler’s efforts to make the LPGA’s most noticeable faces and names more accessible and more prominent. Some of that expansion has happened already on social media, but more will come during tournament broadcasts, mirroring the advancements in the walk-and-talk format in the men’s game.

The post 7 noticeable changes arrive to LPGA broadcasts in 2026 appeared first on Golf.

The post Amazon Prime announces new Rory McIlroy Masters documentary appeared first on Golf.

The post Amazon Prime announces new Rory McIlroy Masters documentary appeared first on Golf.

Rory McIlroy will have the chance to tell his Masters story once and for all — and he’ll have a national audience to share it with.

On Wednesday morning, Amazon Prime announced Rory McIlroy: The Masters Wait, a brand-new documentary film project that will be released on March 30, just days before McIlroy returns to Augusta National for the first time as champion.

While McIlroy’s media presence has spiked in the aftermath of his globe-stopping victory at Augusta National, the Grand Slam winner has yet to sit for the kind of tell-all interview typical for a sporting event of its significance. The Masters Wait appears to be McIlroy’s effort at accomplishing that goal, while also maintaining some level of editorial input through his production company, Firethorn, which is listed as a co-producer in the film’s press release.

A trailer released for the new project shows McIlroy’s career through the lens of the Masters, beginning with his infamous collapse in 2011 and continuing through to his eventual Grand Slam triumph in 2025. McIlroy is the only interviewee shown in the trailer, which also includes an impressive array of cinema-quality footage from his final round last April.

Amazon Prime received the distribution rights for the project, which will serve as original content for the streamer in addition to its brand-new broadcast deal with Augusta National. Prime will carry coverage of the Masters for the first time in 2026, adding two hours of early-week tournament TV coverage to the tournament’s current TV cornucopia and giving the Masters a full-fledged streaming partner for the first time in tournament history.

The new project is also being produced by “Everyone Else,” the production company responsible for the Oscar-winning 2011 documentary Undefeated, which followed the Manassas Tigers high school football team in Memphis. Drea Cooper, who has worked with Everyone Else on a series of documentary projects, has been tabbed as the project’s director.

Beyond the March 30 release date, the press release didn’t specify the release time or film length. You can watch the full teaser trailer for the movie below.

The post Amazon Prime announces new Rory McIlroy Masters documentary appeared first on Golf.

The post Why the PGA of America and NBC, USA Sports extended their media rights deal appeared first on Golf.

The post Why the PGA of America and NBC, USA Sports extended their media rights deal appeared first on Golf.

CBS’s long-running partnership with the Masters (rightfully) earns the plaudits as golf TV’s most prominent handshake agreement, but it’s certainly not the only one.

NBC’s partnership with the Ryder Cup has lasted three decades, and on Monday afternoon, the network and the PGA of America announced it would continue into a fourth, announcing a media rights extension that will carry through the 2033 Ryder Cup at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.

The partnership extension — which included an associated agreement with USA Sports, the current owners/operators of Golf Channel — prolongs the PGA of America’s long-term partnership with NBC, the network which played a considerable role in building out the Ryder Cup from one of golf’s proudest exhibitions into a commercial and economic behemoth capable of sustaining two of golf’s largest governing bodies, the PGA of America and the DP World Tour.

Few golf fans know that the Ryder Cup owes a debt of gratitude to golf’s friends at Major League Baseball, and its network partners at NBC, for infusing a jolt of energy and financial viability into the event. After all, it was former MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti who opened the door for the Ryder Cup on NBC by splitting from the network in the winter of 1988 — and it was NBC who seized the newfound window of opportunity by signing a shrewd agreement with the Ryder Cup in 1990, paving the way for the famed War by the Shore to capture the hearts and minds of golf fans nationwide, dramatically expanding the economic impact of the Cup in the process.

As GOLF.com first profiled back in 2023, an up-and-comer in Dick Ebersol’s NBC Sports department was the first network executive to see the potential in the Ryder Cup as a TV venture. His name was Jon Miller, and he intuited an opportunity in NBC’s golf coverage. At the time, the network had lots of PGA Tour telecasts, but no major championships. While the Ryder Cup wasn’t a “major” in the traditional sense, it provided many of the components that made for compelling golf (and sports) television: two heated rivals, a pesky group of American underdogs, and a vaunted collection of European villains who’d won three straight editions of the Cup.

The Cup also had something compelling for NBC: a dearth of traditional TV partners capable of NBC’s broad cultural impact. The potential partnership was beneficial on both sides of the negotiating table: a new TV property for Ebersol’s (suddenly beleaguered) sports department, and a new TV partner for the PGA of America.

Ebersol loved Miller’s idea, and before long the contract was in ink. When the American side won in dramatic fashion the following fall at Kiawah Island, the Cup was a sports sensation, and NBC’s agreement went from ink to stone.

While NBC’s domain over the Cup might not be considered as ironclad or as vast as CBS’s with the Masters (which will enter a seventh decade in 2026), the network and the PGA of America have maintained a close relationship in the decades since that first Ryder Cup. While the rights to the Ryder Cup could go anywhere — especially as a one-off event with huge commercial potential — it is a testament to the strength of the relationship and the residual goodwill from that first leap in 1990 that NBC remains the partner of choice.

For NBC, the announcement provides an interesting window into the latest shape of the network’s golf partnerships, which have come under increased scrutiny as Peacock continues to add sports programming by the truckload. NBC’s growth strategy in the age of streaming appears to be predicated upon the strength of sports TV rights, which have proven to be one of the few consistent vectors of attention in an increasingly fractured media economy — and the explosion of new rights to NBC (including, ironically, the return of Major League Baseball) has led some to question the long-term viability of golf on the network.

The PGA of America deal will give NBC the rights to the Cup through 2033, extending a year beyond NBC’s existing deal with the USGA, which will provide U.S. Open coverage through 2032, and three years beyond the network’s existing deal with the PGA Tour, which ends in 2030.

The post Why the PGA of America and NBC, USA Sports extended their media rights deal appeared first on Golf.

The post Golf Channel hires surprise new lead analyst for PGA Tour coverage appeared first on Golf.

The post Golf Channel hires surprise new lead analyst for PGA Tour coverage appeared first on Golf.

If you spend any time at all around golf’s crop of TV analysts, you realize something unusual: By the letter of the law, almost none of them are qualified.

The reason for this is not broadcast training or golf skill, but something much simpler. In the history of golf television, there have been only a handful of so-called “Lead Analysts” — the talking heads atop each network’s broadcast — and all but one of them have been major championship winners.

On Wednesday morning, that group added a surprise new voice to the mix: Jim Furyk, who will call two PGA Tour events on the Florida swing — the Arnold Palmer Invitational and Players Championship — in the lead analyst chair for Golf Channel.

The 55-year-old U.S. Open winner and former Ryder Cup captain is no stranger to life inside the ropes. Over the past several years, he’s been a fixture on the PGA Tour Champions, winning the Tour’s rookie of the year award in 2021 and hosting an annual Champions Tour event through his charity, Furyk and Friends. His TV and radio history is less thorough, though he has been no stranger to media scrums in his three decades and 17 victories on the PGA Tour — and has served as a frequent guest on SiriusXM throughout the years.

“It’s probably on a trial basis, see how much I like it, get a feel for it,” Furyk told the Associated Press’ Doug Ferguson. “With any new endeavor, it’s a learning process. There’s a feel and flow for how the show is done. I’m focused on doing the best job for two weeks.”

The 17-time PGA Tour winner may not have a preponderance of TV experience, but he does have a deep well of professional experience to lean on. He has competed as a pro for more than three decades, and enters the Players Championship with five top-5 finishes in the event, including two runner-up finishes, most recently as an out-of-nowhere 48-year-old in 2019. Furyk never won the Arnold Palmer Invitational, but he was just the third pro ever (following Palmer and Bruce Fleisher) to win his first two starts on the Champions Tour.

It’s early to forecast exactly what the tryout period means for Furyk’s TV future (in large part because he does not currently have a TV past to speak of), but he enters the job with something every fellow golf analyst craves: his 2003 victory at the U.S. Open at Olympia Fields. While Furyk might ultimately choose not to pursue a pathway to a lead analyst role with any of golf’s major networks, the major championship pedigree provides him with a potential pathway to a lead analyst chair that, until NBC’s Kevin Kisner, had only ever been occupied by major championship winners.

Ironically, Kisner’s path to the lead chair at NBC could provide clues for Furyk as he tries to navigate the journey forward. Kisner was a full-time PGA Tour player when he first stepped into NBC’s “tryout” to replace Paul Azinger in the lead analyst chair, then spent a year flirting with the job on a part-time basis before being named Azinger’s permanent replacement at the end of 2024.

Kisner was a cool customer from the beginning at NBC, but he proved it was possible to grow on the job en route to something bigger. For now, that’s not on Furyk’s radar — but by the end of March, he could be singing a very different tune.

The post Golf Channel hires surprise new lead analyst for PGA Tour coverage appeared first on Golf.

The post 5 noticeable changes on CBS Golf TV broadcasts in 2026 appeared first on Golf.

The post 5 noticeable changes on CBS Golf TV broadcasts in 2026 appeared first on Golf.

You did not have to be a particularly skilled TV watcher to notice the most significant shift in the CBS Golf booth during the network’s coverage of the PGA Tour’s “West Coast Swing” — but you did have to be a persistent one.

The most noticeable shift of the 2026 golf season for CBS arrived at Pebble Beach late on Sunday evening, after winner Collin Morikawa had vanished into the bliss of his first victory on U.S. soil in nearly five years — and after Morikawa’s caddie Matt Urbanek had disappeared into the night with the 18th hole flag at Pebble Beach. It arrived 50 yards off the side of the 18th fairway, down a craggly outcropping of rocks and on a beach facing a steadily rising tide.

The shift’s name was Johnson Wagner, CBS Golf’s newest on-course reporter, who’d arrived to reprise his role as golf’s preeminent stunt-double. And as he surveyed the shot from the side of 18 that had delayed the end of the golf tournament for upwards of 20 minutes, the high-velocity hum of the CBS Golf broadcast stalled into a vacuum of anticipatory silence.

News

CBS Golf's newest voice has an unorthodox superpower

By: James Colgan

With a 50-degree wedge plucked from his bag, Wagner settled his feet, steadied his grip and swung. And with that swing, we start our look into the biggest changes on CBS in 2026 — starting with the guy whose on-course heroics have taken a new tune …

5 noticeable CBS Golf changes in 2026

5. Johnson Wagner

Wagner’s addition to the CBS Golf team is, in fact, much bigger than on-course hijinks — though he earned quite a reputation for those in his time with Golf Channel and NBC. In his day job with CBS, Wagner will be the network’s third “walking reporter,” behind ace walkers Dottie Pepper and Mark Immelman. But he will moonlight doing the kind of segments that have become a golf staple over the last several years: Leaning into his experience as a pro golfer for more than two decades to recreate the biggest shots and moments of the day himself, giving fans a deeper look into their difficulty and nuance.

Wagner and CBS are still working out the particulars of those segments and how they fit into the network’s broadcasts, but they’ve already yielded plenty of entertainment. (For example, after hitting his shot from the beach, Wagner was given thirty seconds to scale the rocks at Pebble Beach before CBS cut to a break. He made it safely with five seconds to spare.)

As the new season progresses, expect Wagner’s role to expand in kind.

4. Colt Knost moves upstairs

Colt Knost’s promotion to a spot in the CBS “super tower” precipitated Wagner’s hiring at CBS — a promotion itself precipitated by longtime analyst Ian Baker-Finch’s retirement from the CBS booth after more than two decades in TV.

Knost received the call to the bullpen to fill Baker-Finch’s seat, and though there’s no replacing Baker-Finch’s role in the CBS broadcast, Knost has already brought some of his own spin to the booth. He’ll play a vital role for CBS next to fellow analysts Frank Nobilo and Trevor Immelman, and alongside play-by-play man Jim Nantz.

3. New Drones!

The PGA Tour and CBS earned an Emmy last year for the latest expansion in drone camerawork, a new technology named “Drone AR.” The new drone added a shot tracer to CBS’s existing drone complement, allowing the network to showcase tee and approach shots in a three-dimensional axis. It was immediately popular, and quickly followed up by the “shot tracer probability” lines, which leaned on the Tour’s expansive ShotLink database to predict the outcome of a tee shot (green for good, red for bad!).

In 2026, those animations are receiving another upgrade, adding analytics to the Drone AR that help explain player tendencies, course strategy and shot intent. If you were watching at Pebble Beach, you saw the first instances of these upgrades in action — though more are expected (on each of the Tour’s network broadcasts) over the course of the 2026 season.

2. B-2 Broadcast Graphics

If you were watching closely, you might have seen golf’s version of the B-2 bomber flying over the skies of Pebble Beach, Phoenix or Riviera over the last several weeks.

No, not an actual B-2 (though that would be inarguably sick) — but rather the PGA Tour’s new “Weather Applied Metrics”, which help visualize the impact of changing weather conditions by turning the invisible forces of airflow into fully visible, computer-generated graphics.

We’ve seen versions of the “Weather Applied Metrics” utilized in Tour broadcasts in the past, most notably around the 17th tee box at the Players Championship. But this new version of the technology is more robust and comprehensive than previous iterations, showcasing changes in wind, temperature and humidity to help viewers understand the changes each week.

1. A new schedule

Golf fans have witnessed the Tour’s shape-shifting schedule from up close in 2026, with The Sentry’s late cancellation in Maui and the return of the Cadillac Championship at Doral as part of March’s Florida Swing.

Those changes have had downstream effects on the Tour’s broadcasters, which have jockeyed their 2026 television schedules to accommodate the shifts. First, CBS will scoop the Cadillac from Doral, picking up a tournament at a venue where the network holds a half-century of broadcasting history. In exchange for that addition (and NBC’s loss of the Sentry), CBS will trade the Travelers Championship to NBC, helping to even out the regular-season Tour schedule.

There’s also a change on the PGA Tour’s postseason broadcast schedule. As part of the every-other-year cadence of the Tour’s broadcast rights, CBS will pick up this year’s FedEx Cup Playoffs, with coverage continuing through the Tour Championship at the end of August.

The post 5 noticeable changes on CBS Golf TV broadcasts in 2026 appeared first on Golf.

The post 5 reasons for golf’s colossal TV ratings jump to start 2026 season appeared first on Golf.

The post 5 reasons for golf’s colossal TV ratings jump to start 2026 season appeared first on Golf.

Good news first.

The latest numbers for golf television are up big-time. Like, significantly-larger-than-expected, big-time. The 2026 American Express, won by Scottie Scheffler in his first start of the new year? That averaged 515,000 viewers for the weekend on Golf Channel — up more than 125 percent over 2025, including a 281 percent jump during Saturday’s third round (which, graciously, was not forced to compete with the AFC and NFC Championship games.)

The 2026 Farmers Insurance Open, won by Justin Rose in a blowout? That averaged 2.9 million viewers on CBS, the best finish from Torrey Pines in six years for the PGA Tour, and an increase of nearly 70 percent over last year’s final round. And the interest in Brooks Koepka’s big PGA Tour return wasn’t half-bad either — with Thursday and Friday’s opening rounds generating gains of 87 and 115 percent, respectively, on Golf Channel, and ESPN signing on to carry early day coverage of the opening two rounds on their cable network.

These are big, big numbers, but are they a sign of things to come? It’s early to say, especially with the previous week’s Sony Open TV final-round numbers coming in at just 106,000 average viewers, or roughly one-third of the year prior. But, like most golf TV ratings, it helps to add a dose of context. So, let’s examine the reasons for golf’s big start to 2026.

1. Scheduling

It’s probably a good idea for us to start with the most obvious qualifier for the ratings jumps: Scheduling. Notably, this year’s Farmers Insurance Open aired in its traditional Thursday-to-Sunday spot, ending a several-year experiment in the Wednesday to Saturday slot to accommodate CBS’s broadcast of the AFC Championship Game.

The shift back to the traditional weekend schedule always figured to result in bigger ratings for Torrey, which never quite caught on in the new timeslot despite earning praise for its flexibility. The Tour’s decision to move the event to the weekend after the conference championship games helped, too. Without any football competing with the Farmers, Torrey Pines earned a full weekend of national TV spotlight, and the event quickly showed why so many golf fans have come to adore it on the calendar.

2. Nielsen

If the NFL is any indication, it’s likely we’ll see all ratings up this year in pro golf, as the majority of the sports world shifts from the traditional Nielsen “panel” methodology to the new Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” methodology. The new “Big Data” panel, which incorporates better out-of-home viewing and attempts to capture a share of those watching on Smart TVs, aims to reflect a more representative sample of the TV-watching audience than Nielsen’s traditional device-driven method. But so far, the effect of Big Data has been bigger numbers for nearly everybody in the sports industry, including the NFL, which was up by about 10 percent over 2025.

For golf, the boosts could be even more significant. In the eyes of many golf television executives, the sport has long been underrepresented in Nielsen’s ratings thanks to its older, more affluent audience (which might be less inclined to place a traditional Nielsen “device” inside their living room). Now, with Big Data, many executives are theorizing the golf audience can be captured more effectively, leading to bigger gains. Again, it’s early, but this could be a big factor.

3. Scottie Scheffler

Strange as it sounds, the back half of the 2025 season showed real signals that Scheffler could be entering rarefied air among golfers … and not just for his win percentage. Scheffler’s wins at the PGA Championship and Open Championship delivered big audiences to golf — despite neither resulting in a particularly thrilling finish — a sign that Scheffler’s dominance was starting to seep in with a more casual sports audience.

His win at the American Express reflected more of the same: A blowout victory running directly against the NFL’s conference championship matchups … and yet many golf fans stopped what they were doing to tune in to his rout. There’s not enough evidence to call Scheffler a one-man needle-mover … yet. But we might not be as far from that reality as it seems.

4. Brooks Koepka

Koepka’s return to the PGA Tour was a big story. It was also, critically, an early-week story. Both things helped the end-of-week ratings, even if some golf fans were peeved by how much they saw of Koepka on the weekend despite the wide distance between him and the lead.

Golf fans curious to see Koepka’s return to golf might have been sucked into Thursday or Friday’s coverage, which might have had a downstream effect on Saturday and Sunday. It’s certainly a stretch to suggest Koepka’s (or later, Patrick Reed’s) return to the Tour will provide a bump for more than a week, but you can bet the Tour will take every eyeball.

5. Coherence!

It’s become almost cliche to talk about the PGA Tour’s big goals for the future — fewer events, greater significance, more coherence to the golf calendar. But here there might actually be the first signs of life. The West Coast swing has felt decidedly juicier than in years’ past, a change owed to a calendar that seems to flow more coherently … with events condensed into a more predictable window.

Consider the Amex, which might not typically draw a big audience or big headlines. Sure, it was helped by Scheffler winning, but his win only happened because he was in the field, and he was only in the field because an early season flight to Kapalua was nixed from the calendar. Same goes for Torrey, which didn’t benefit from nearly as many stars in attendance, but benefited from the Tour’s emphasis on coherence just the same. Thanks to the creation of an eleventh-hour rules loophole, Koepka was able to reenter the Tour immediately. And because he was able to reenter immediately, he was one of the biggest names and faces in an otherwise softer field.

It might not seem like much, but these are the decisions that alter TV ratings. So far, the Tour is batting nearly a thousand.

The post 5 reasons for golf’s colossal TV ratings jump to start 2026 season appeared first on Golf.