Getty Image / Ben Jared / PGA TOUR
The final round of The Masters delivered on the hype. Scottie Scheffler has been the best golfer in the world for over two years and it hasn’t been particularly close. Scheffler’s currently leading the PGA Tour in Strokes Gained, Birdies, Birdie Average, Scoring Avg, Putting Avg, Par 4 and Par 5 scoring average, front 9 and back 9 scoring average, and that’s only about 20% of the categories Scottie leads right now.
Everything was set up to be a banner day at Augusta National GC with the final pairings stacked full of high-profile golfers and yet, the TV ratings are out for Sunday’s final round at The Masters and they are bad.
According to SportsBusinessJournal reporter Josh Carpenter, TV ratings for the final round of The Masters were down 20% year over year. On X (formerly Twitter), Carpenter reported “Golf viewership continues to drop: CBS drew 9.589M viewers for the final round of the Masters on Sunday, down 20% from last year. Scottie Scheffler’s four-shot win was the second-largest deficit of the season. Lowest final round since 2021 (9.450M for Hideki Matsuyama’s win)”
Kevin Van Valkenburg, former ESPN golf journalist and current Editorial Director of NoLayingUp summed it up perfectly with his tweet where he wrote ‘Congrats to everyone who broke this niche sport and then said “If everyone was competing in the same place, that would fix it.”‘
A missing component of this story, which was just brought to my attention by a CBS spokesman, is how ‘out of home’ viewership changed year over year. Last year The Masters fell on Easter Sunday so most were watching from home and this year that wasn’t the case. Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch writes “Sunday’s final round was down -20% vs. last year’s final round, but an important distinction is that last year’s final round was on Easter Sunday (significantly higher out-of-home lift on the holiday: +21% in 2023 vs. +9% this year).”
Golf is broken. The Masters ratings are hurting. Can they be fixed?
Any possible deal between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund (LIV Golf) won’t fix this overnight. There has been a massive schism created in golf with some of the most exciting and charismatic figures leaving the PGA Tour for LIV.
All signs indicate a deal is not imminent or even necessarily likely. In any case, it’s not worth holding out for. So the same people saying ‘golf needs to come together’ need to at least take some stock of their lives and recognize that they had the greatest hand in this.
Yes, the PGA Tour could have handled things differently over the years and particularly so with the rise of LIV Golf but hindsight is 20/20 and the past can’t be changed. Golf’s TV ratings will continue to suffer and that will probably be felt the hardest by LIV Golf which only managed to draw 432,000 viewers on Super Bowl Sunday with a tournament in Las Vegas. A week later they only drew in 297,000 viewers on the CW Network.
Neither the PGA Tour nor LIV Golf appears to be willing to be the first party to bend. Golf fans are suffering. Change is needed.