One Year After Airing Far Too Many Commercials, USGA Aims for an Improved U.S. Open Broadcast
Unless you get paid to do it, nobody assesses television coverage in anything more than an arbitrary sense. Sports fans react largely to the teams they follow and the games they play, not the people who announce them, so for every viewer who thinks Tony Romo does a fabulous job calling the NFL for CBS, there are hundreds who really don’t care and probably don’t notice. His insight is a mere accoutrement to the competition itself.
Two things an audience clearly doesn’t like—gripes accommodated by the vessel of public grievance known as social media—are interruption and inconvenience. Last year’s U.S. Open pled guilty to both felonies after a week of constant commercial disruptions and NBC’s decision to bounce the telecast back and forth among three of the parent company’s visual platforms. To say those factors ruined a strong performance by the network’s on-air staff would be an exaggeration, but it’s not like chatrooms across America were extolling Dan Hicks’s versatility as a big-game anchor.
The complaints were loud enough to prompt the attention of USGA chief executive officer Mike Whan. “I’m on it!” he replied via Twitter last Father’s Day. “If the amount of interruptions are problematic, we will work with our partner to do better!”
Exclamation points aside, the day of reckoning has arrived. The 123rd U.S. Open will continue to divide its time on three Comcast-owned properties: the primary source (NBC), a cable channel (USA Network) and a streaming service (Peacock). This year, however, all but one hour of the weekend coverage will appear on NBC—no remote search necessary. That’s 10 hours each day, which is sure to leave your wife wishing you’d become addicted to another sport. Any other sport.
As for the conspicuous absence of Golf Channel, it will continue to handle postgame duties with “Live From.” Why does USA get a piece of the tournament over an entity indigenous to the game itself? A source at NBC once cryptically explained that it was for branding purposes, which might be loosely interpreted as the opportunity to generate more advertising revenue at a general-interest network than one with niche programming. Besides, there must be five or six WWE fans out there who know which end of the club to hold.
The glut of commercial breakaways in 2022 led to far more backlash than this game of corporate musical chairs, however, and we’ll see if Whan makes good on his word. He certainly has the pull to create a more enjoyable telecast. It’s also worth noting that perhaps one-third of the commercial spots that clogged viewer arteries last June were USGA promos—well intentioned but incredibly repetitive, with nothing to be gained fiscally during perhaps the biggest tournament all year.
It’s not a sin, just a nuisance. As Whan enters his third year at the USGA helm, he’s had plenty of time to ponder the serious slump plaguing the organization’s franchise player. U.S. Open television ratings have been dropping for years. The PGA Championship has attracted a larger final-round audience every spring since moving to May in 2019—this despite last year’s affair in Boston ranking as the most-watched U.S. Open held on the East Coast since 2013.
Such a scenario would have been incomprehensible two decades ago, when every major was getting fat off the land ruled by Eldrick T. Woods. You can talk about America’s changing viewing habits, the impact of streaming and the loss of Tiger as a viewer magnet, but facts are still facts.
- The 1992 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach set the original modern standard with a 6.8 Nielsen rating—it took the USGA a while to realize that the West Coast means prime time, and prime time means more eyeballs. After several years hovering around 6, the rating soared to 7.8 in 1997. Guess who won the Masters that spring?
- As stated countless times in various contexts, Woods's impact on the size of a TV audience is astounding. His 15-stroke triumph at Pebble produced a whopping 8.8 rating in 2000. His victory at Bethpage two years later registered a 9.3. No U.S. Open since has come close to matching that number, although his third and final tournament victory (2008) earned an 8.5.
- That’s when the party ended. In the 14 national championships that have followed, the largest Sunday audience tapped out at 6.9 in 2010, when Woods was in contention at Pebble Beach. From there, audiences began shrinking. Slowly at first, then precipitously in 2014, when the rating tumbled from 6.1 to 3.3.
Matt Fitzpatrick’s triumph last June earned a 2.9—a staggering 68% decrease in the number of people who witnessed Woods’s triumph at an utterly suspenseless gathering 20 years earlier. All four majors have suffered from Tiger’s absence over time, but no tournament of any importance has sustained a loss of viewership comparable to that of the U.S. Open.
That’s why Mike Whan is on it. On Twitter, on the case, and if he can do anything about it, on the mend. His product is bleeding profusely; the last thing the USGA needs is an avalanche of non-profit commercials driving viewers away. According to last year’s data, about 140,000 people watched the tournament via the internet. When the crown jewel of your operation has dropped 6 and a half million customers in the last two decades, you don’t blame it on the streaming industry.
Is the golf too boring to satisfy a mainstream constituency that already views professional golf as an excellent excuse to take a nap? You can’t soften up U.S. Open venues just to make the competition more interesting. And you can’t really reduce the amount of commercial time allocated because it won’t be long before those ads drop in value.
Mike Whan has a tough job. Come this time next week, it won’t have gotten any easier.