Most returning sports have registered good ratings since their return. But the PGA Tour’s television performance so far has been extraordinary.
Since the PGA Tour returned in June, CBS is averaging 2.46 million viewers for its weekend coverage — a figure that is up 27% from comparable events last year, according to numbers crunched by SBJ’s Austin Karp. Golf Channel’s overall PGA Tour viewership is up 47% from comparable events last year.
The WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational on CBS posted the tournament’s biggest Sunday TV audience in 19 years — up 38% from last year. The final round of the Workday Charity Open in mid-July was up 55% over the final round of the John Deere Classic on the same weekend in 2019. The Memorial posted its biggest Sunday viewership since 2015.
What makes TV executives particularly giddy about these numbers is that they are coming without Tiger Woods. For the past decade or more, tournaments with Woods in contention always rated much higher than ones where he was not on the leaderboard.
During the pandemic, Woods has played in only one event through Aug. 2. And even in that event — The Memorial — he was so far back on the leaderboard that he didn’t even make CBS’s coverage.
