NBC’s Lead Golf Analyst Tears into CBS Over Sunday’s Rough Masters Broadcast: ‘What Are We Doing?’

CBS came under fire for a few big mistakes in Sunday’s final round broadcast of the Masters. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Sunday’s final round of the Masters ended with Rory McIlroy tapping in for bogey and a historic win at Augusta National. While McIlroy’s thrilling victory was the story coming out of another wild finish at golf’s most iconic tournament, CBS’s final round coverage of the event was also a huge talking point because the usual top team in golf had a rough showing.

While many fans and media outlets have sounded off on those issues, now we have someone from NBC’s golf team tearing into CBS, and he’s absolutely correct with his critiques.

Kevin Kisner, who played on the PGA Tour for years and has teed it up in the Masters eight times, is now NBC’s lead golf analyst and he wasn’t happy with one big problem that CBS had during Sunday’s final round. If you watched it on TV while also tracking the official Masters leaderboard on its stellar app or website, then you know that the broadcast was often way behind the action and relied far too much on showing shots on tape.

Kisner noticed that and wasn’t impressed. He said on the golf podcast for Barstool Sports:

“They were literally showing s--- that I knew happened 10 minutes ago all day long,” Kisner said on Barstool Sports’ ForePlay podcast. “What are we doing, man? You have no commercials. Play live shots. Our production team at NBC prides themselves on playing every shot that they possibly can live … I have no idea what they’re doing. Literally no idea. They’re showing every shot on tape. I don’t even know how the announcers call it. I don’t know how Colt can act like he doesn’t know what’s happening when it’s already happened. There were a couple of shots in the two days that were seven to 10 minutes behind. It was unbelievable, dude. I’m not trying to just kill them but being in TV for 30 times and seeing what our production team does it was just fascinating to me.”

Kisner didn’t stop there.

“So your entire Masters coverage is a fantasy world. It’s bulls---,” he said. “Whatever we all watch has already happened seven minutes ago. Could you imagine watching the f------ Super Bowl and being like, yea 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 piss. What are we doing, man?”

Here's a snippet of NBC golf analyst Kevin Kisner's rant against CBS and its Masters coverage on @ForePlayPod.

"What are we doing? You have no commercials. Play live shots." pic.twitter.com/8XgNUj6MLC

— Josh Carpenter (@JoshACarpenter) April 14, 2026

What makes Kisner’s fiery comments so interesting is that we don’t usually hear announcers from other networks ripping their competitors so open and freely like he did on the podcast. He has a point, though—the amount of delay in Sunday’s broadcast was odd.

Jim Nantz admits that the CBS broadcast made some mistakes

Jim Nantz, who has long been the lead voice of CBS’ golf coverage, spoke Tuesday about Sunday’s final round and admitted that there were some mistakes but that he was proud of his team.

“It's live television. We all make mistakes,” Nantz said during an appearance on the Pat McAfee Show. “I can't speak to the difficulty and some of the decision-making, and some of the other things that people are responsible for. I just know that our crew is the best in the business.”

Jim Nantz talking CBS coverage of Masters final round on @PatMcAfeeShow.

"It's live television. We all make mistakes. ... I can't speak to the difficulty and some of the decision-making, and some of the other things that people are responsible for."
pic.twitter.com/8Cgnk1Hsw8

— David Rumsey (@_DavidRumsey) April 14, 2026

While the delays were unfortunate, CBS also had some bigger issues on Sunday.

CBS completely botched Rory McIlroy’s final hole

As we stated on Monday, CBS had a rough final hole of the tournament. It started with the crew losing McIIroy’s difficult approach shot on 18 and ended with a bad angle on his tap-in putt that didn’t allow viewers to see the ball going in the hole. They also lost Cameron Young’s approach shot in 18, which happened right after McIlroy’s shot from the trees on the right.

CBS also didn’t show Haotong Li’s 10 on 13

Haotong Li was playing alongside Scottie Scheffler in one of the last groups on Sunday and thanks to a number of bad shots, including a putt that rolled off the green and into the water, he finished with a 10 on the par-5 13th hole. CBS didn’t show us any of that, instead they mentioned that Scheffler had to wait while Li searched for his ball after a bad approach shot and then putted his ball into the water. That would have been fun to see on TV.

The CBS golf team is usually the best in the business, but they had an off day on the biggest stage of on Sunday. Hopefully they can learn from it and get back to their usual standard next year.

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