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If you found yourself watching Lilia Foe’s thrilling victory Sunday at NBC’s Chevron Championship, you may have missed it.
Indeed, NBC hopes so an act lose it.
With golf ending in dramatic fashion—with Vu and Angel Yin battling it out for the first major championship of the renewed women’s golf season—you may have found yourself focusing on golf. Not the fact that NBC didn’t miss a moment of action from the nine back drama all the way to the bitter end.
Of course, if you’re watching, you are an act Focus on golf. This is much evident in NBC’s recent ratings report, which showed an average audience of about 941,000 viewers during Sunday’s final run, the largest since 2010 for the tournament (formerly ANA Inspiration)’s first year in its new venue.
In all, NBC stayed on the air for more than 90 minutes after its original Sunday broadcast window at Chevron, beyond any reasonable expectation to complete the tournament when the day began (a time frame backed by a sudden-death playoff). In order to stay off the air throughout the end of the cycle, the network cut its local news broadcast at 6 p.m. ET, 6:30 p.m. ET. NBC Nightly News broadcast, and at half past 7 p.m. ET date line broadcast.
Now, we want to be clear that we’re not celebrating NBC for the sake of it no Hang the viewers to dry. It is the network’s job and responsibility to cover its tournaments to the end. But given the firestorm that would have (rightly) surrounded the network had it chosen to bail out Chevron in favor of any of those other programs, NBC’s decision in this case is noteworthy. And given the ratings that came with Sunday’s latest round at Chevron, NBC’s decision is worth highlighting.
Critics often argue that women’s events draw fewer hours of national television than their counterparts because of declining interest and television viewership. But recent viewing data seems to imply the opposite, as big women’s events turn expanded national television windows into record ratings for their networks. Notably, NBC said the audience for the Chevron Championship peaked at 1.54 million viewers around 7:15 p.m.
Good thing they stuck to it.
LIV tape delay debut
We won’t know for some time how the LIV tape delay debut on the CW performed in the US. In fact, without reliable sighting data (which, for reasons we’ve explained here, should be self-reported by LIV), we might not know at all. But there’s no questioning how it feels to see a tape-delayed broadcast of a major sports league in the age of the Internet.
strange.
LIV’s first trip to Australia was, by most accounts, an overwhelming success. Fans turned out in droves to watch professional golf in Adelaide, and the resulting highlights represent some of the best live championship moments seen from the new league since its inception. But on the other side of the United States, the picture wasn’t quite as bright… quite literally.
When Talor Gooch won the LIV Adelaide title on Sunday morning, the sun had not yet risen on the east coast of the United States. To the west, a few pubs have recently made the last call. certainly some People tuned in to watch the end of Sunday’s live broadcast on the CW app, which will broadcast all live broadcasts this year regardless of the time difference. But for the overwhelming majority of those in the States, watching the final round on LIV didn’t start for another 10 hours or so after finishing play, when the tournament started (with a delay) on the CW.
Tape delay isn’t great for anyone, from fans watching at home to championship and league officials responsible for managing websites and social media accounts who have to decide if the instant internet speed is worth turning away viewers or potential followers. This embarrassment was evident in the league’s official social media accounts, which covered the event in Australian time, but waited to post the winner’s drawings to Instagram until 9 a.m. ET—nearly two hours after the event was completed—when it was a larger area than the Americans. The audience was up. Those accounts were largely quiet when LIV was posted on The CW later in the afternoon. A similar situation was on the official LIV website, which greeted visitors halfway through the US broadcast window (shortly before 3pm ET) with highlights from the final round, a final leaderboard, and headlines summarizing the day’s action.
In short, it is a situation without a clear solution for LIV. No one likes to have the tournament finale spoiled beforehand. Nobody likes social media posts that are posted hours after their scheduled time (or, for that matter, before much of the league’s home country viewing audience has even woken up). And no one He loves to see a half-day-old sports product, even when the alternative means waking up in the hell of a night listening to it.
Perhaps the fix would be for fans to get in the habit of avoiding the internet on the last morning of Alien action and watching it on lag. Perhaps for the sake of a larger space it is tuned for night watching parties. Or maybe just get over it.
In any case, it’s a new problem the LIV has encountered—one that helps explain some of the PGA Tour’s reticence to building a fully international schedule in its own right.
Creating an entire world tour turned out to be no easy feat. Who would have thought?