Golf’s TV ratings fog? Rory McIlroy has an interesting solution

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Rory McIlroy arrived in Pebble Beach a shade after 9 a.m. local time on Tuesday to find the fog had lifted two ways.

For the first time in at least a year, McIlroy could clearly see the sixth green at Pebble Beach.

And he could take a peek into golf’s future.

Last year, McIlroy left Monterey Peninsula after a miserable, rain-shortened tournament which marked the beginning of a dreary PGA Tour spring. TV ratings, which had held strong for the first years of golf’s LIV split, tumbled after Pebble and would not recover throughout the 2024 season. The Tour’s weekend viewership dropped by 15 percent in ’24, creating an offseason filled with questions regarding the sport’s entertainment future.

This year, McIlroy arrived in Pebble Beach on a charter jet from his native Jupiter, Fla. in brilliant sunlight. The golf world was back at Pebble Beach for a week to set the tenor for the season to follow, and McIlroy had some clear thoughts about what the people watching on TV should expect.

“Look, it’s a balance,” McIlroy said from the lectern at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where he will soon make his first PGA Tour start of 2025. “When we’re growing up dreaming of professional golfers and trying to get the best out of ourselves, the last thing on our mind is being an entertainer. We’re competitive people at the end of the day, we want to play against the best players in the world and we want to try to come out on top. I think that in itself should be entertaining to people.”

McIlroy arrived late to Pebble Beach this week, but his tardiness was excused. On Monday night, he starred in the TGL’s best match yet: an overtime brawl between the Boston Ballfrogs and Tiger Woods’ Jupiter Links GC watched by some 864,000 average viewers. For the third time in four weeks, the TGL had good TV ratings news to share with the world.

What did that mean for the PGA Tour? Admittedly not very much. The new league does not affect the Tour’s bottom line, and the friendly relationship between the two sides is as much a gesture of goodwill as it is one of good business. (The TGL and PGA Tour are officially “partners,” but the scope of the agreement remains unknown.) But as another slow weekend at Torrey Pines opened another round of bitter debate over how to “fix” the PGA Tour, McIlroy wondered if the TGL might provide some answers.

“I think [the PGA Tour] already has been diminished [by golf’s other entertainment offerings],” McIlroy said. “I would say yeah, look, the one thing about like TGL’s only going to last two months. You get this big burst of it in January, February and a little bit of March, then it’s done. It’s gone for 10 months basically. I would say that is hopefully somewhat additive to the ecosystem.”

The TGL is a fascinating launching-off point for a larger discussion about golf’s TV future because it is golf’s TV future … or at least someone’s approximation of it. Former Golf Channel bigwig/TGL founder Mike McCarley built the primetime, simulator golf league for television. Every nook and cranny has been optimized and maximized for those watching at home. Little thought was given to golf’s preexisting traditions of meritocracy nor fresh air. The result? Fans have already grown to adore some of the league’s most critical advancements, like the shot clock and player access, while viewership on ESPN has skewed more than a decade younger than traditional golf on TV.

To be clear, it’s not all peachy. Plenty of golf traditionalists loathe what the TGL has done to the sport’s sanctity, plenty of regular fans have been turned off by the league’s blithely Hollywoodized vision, and at least 150,000 average viewers from Tiger’s first telecast didn’t bother coming back for his second. But the TGL is one of many efforts at modernizing golf percolating throughout the sport as the calendar flips to 2025. The league may not be as popular or as well-received as YouTube golf, which is still riding a Brysonified U.S. Open bull run, but it is a vision of golf untethered to 18 holes or leisurely pace or daylight or grass — and at least some people seem to be coming back for more.

Of course, it helps that the TGL is a new product. And it helps, as McIlroy points out, that the TGL will only be around for another six weeks or so before it disappears for another 10 months. This schedule might have been mandated by the golf calendar, which intensifies around the beginning of April, but it has the added benefit of turning the TGL into a limited-edition product. Folks are incentivized to tune in during the few weeks it is happening, lest they miss out altogether. Perhaps there’s a lesson there for McIlroy’s friends at the Tour.

“I think there’s space for all of this,” McIlroy said. “I can see when the golf consumer might get a little fatigued of everything that’s available to them. So to scale it back a little bit and maybe have a little more scarcity in some of the stuff that we do, like the NFL. I think that mightn’t be a bad thing.”

Scarcity … as in, fewer tournaments?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think 47 or 50 tournaments a year is definitely too many.”

That’s one interesting — and to date unconsidered — approach to golf’s future: a PGA Tour smaller than it is today. Fewer events would allow the Tour to be choosier about its resources, compel players to meet in the same environments, and signal clearly to fans when they should tune in to watch on TV. Ironically, the Signature Events model was built precisely to fix these issues, but the model stopped short of cutting events from the Tour schedule — a change that would harm the Tour’s working class (to say nothing of its TV revenue).

It is hard to say how scarcity in golf would look. Since commissioner Jay Monahan took over the Tour in January 2017, the Tour schedule has only expanded in size. So, is the problem the quality of the golf, or the quantity? McIlroy has his answer.

“I came out on the wrong side of it last year, but I would say the last round of the U.S. Open was pretty entertaining last year and that was pure competitive golf,” he said. “I think the more we can get to scenarios like that, the better.”

“These are all the things that have been getting kicked around,” McIlroy said. “But like first and foremost we’re professional golfers, we want to go out there and shoot the best score possible that we can and try to beat each other. You know, hopefully people find that entertaining, and if not, then I don’t know what to tell them.”

A golf world centered around fewer, more serious tournaments? That sounds nice. A golf world where stars like Rory McIlroy aren’t forced to expend too much energy contemplating existential questions of golf’s public appeal? That sounds nice too.

We’re not there yet. But maybe soon.