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The men’s and women’s golf championships will head to Arizona in 2020.
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It was Golf Channel’s first year of televising the NCAA golf championships when the network’s president, Mike McCarley, watched Alabama’s players run down the fairway and leap into one another’s arms after winning the title.
Only a few times before — at select team events such as the Ryder Cup — had he seen golfers celebrate victories in such a manner, with bear hugs and tears in their eyes. That’s when McCarley knew Golf Channel was onto something with college golf.
Fueled by the network’s early success beginning in 2014, Golf Channel extended its rights deal with the NCAA for the men’s and women’s Division I golf championships through 2029, tacking an additional 10 years on the original agreement. A formal announcement is expected later this week.
Golf Channel would not comment on financial terms of the deal.
“Fans identify with the passions of college sports in ways that they don’t with individual golfers,” McCarley said. “The passion you see in college sports, you rarely see in golf. … The team aspect of college golf is incredibly important. But it’s a team that fans identify with because of the football team or the basketball team or because it’s their alma mater. There’s a college sports passion that we’re able to tap into that we were never able to tap into before in the sport of golf.”
Golf Channel’s rights coincided with the NCAA’s format change to separate individual and match-play team championships, which is a main reason the network wanted to extend. Individual champions are crowned in late May and just a few days later, the team champions are decided, compressing all the thrills of the men’s and women’s winners into a Monday-Wednesday window.
The schedule fits McCarley’s strategy for Golf Channel — that is, he wants to build up as much live programming Monday through Wednesday as he can to complement professional golf that runs Thursday through Sunday.
“This relationship has done so much to raise the profile of these championships,” said Joni Comstock, the NCAA’s senior vice president who oversees championships. “We’ve hit a very high note in terms of quality of broadcast, quality of play and visibility.”
The NCAA will add another twist to its men’s and women’s championships starting in 2020 when it takes both to Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz., for a three-year run. Until then, only softball (Oklahoma City) and baseball (Omaha, Neb.) returned to the same sites.
Going west also will provide Golf Channel with the opportunity to showcase college golf in prime time, which will bring in bigger audiences.
“If we can build more of a household name in college — like every other professional sport does, for the most part — this will translate to more household names on the professional tours,” McCarley said. “It’s an evolutionary build for us that helps programming of all types if we do this the right way in college.”
