The Grammys red carpet show on CBS only ran for 22 minutes instead of an hour thanks to golf.
CBSGolfPop CultureBy Andrew Bucholtz on

Sunday was not a good day for CBS’ social media team, as they got yelled at both for showing too little golf and showing too much golf.

First, they went to coverage of the PGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Open 21 minutes late thanks to the Michigan State-Maryland game running long, and they took a lot of criticism for that from angry golf viewers. Then, that tournament ran 38 minutes into CBS’ scheduled Grammy Red Carpet Live, which had a whole lot of Grammys viewers upset.

There was still red carpet coverage available from competitors like E!, and CBS’ own coverage was streaming on All Access, their Facebook page, the Recording Academy’s Facebook page, and Grammys.com, but that didn’t please many of those looking to watch it on CBS.

That golf overrun might cause some significant financial losses (possibly in the millions) for CBS given how high Grammys red carpet viewership has been in recent years (it drew 4.04 million viewers and a 3.2 rating in overnights last year). And they didn’t please golf fans either; the Farmers Open still wasn’t over when they left, so CBS pushed coverage of the three-man playoff over to the NBC-owned Golf Channel, again upsetting golf fans (and probably losing out on some viewers and potential commercial revenue there).

Here’s Jim Nantz’s throw of “We go from the gimmes to the Grammys,” plus his announcement that the tournament coverage would continue on Golf Channel:

Oh, and when CBS did get into the red carpet coverage, they started with an intro that talked about them being live, but then included host Kevin Frazier saying “for the next hour, we will work every inch of this red carpet.” (Which may have aired earlier on the stream, presumably.) This Hour Has 22 Minutes is far better as a CBC comedy program than a statement of fact.

CBS threw in a whole lot of commercials to try and make up for the time they missed. So pretty much everyone got upset, and nothing worked out well for the network. Here are some of the tweets from the upset Grammys viewers:

https://twitter.com/the_vampire_god/status/957758159828987906

https://twitter.com/ChrisAlanMiller/status/957764082521829376

https://twitter.com/carronJphillips/status/957767647189487616

And once they did make the change, many complained about the packed-in commercials:

Meanwhile, some golf viewers got upset that CBS bailed ahead of the playoff, sending coverage over to Golf Channel:

https://twitter.com/Joe_Getty/status/957767478163197953

As with the earlier basketball-golf controversy, CBS didn’t really have any great options here. They could maybe have punted golf coverage to the Golf Channel even before the playoff and got in more of the red carpet show, but that would have irritated golf fans even more.

They probably were hoping it wouldn’t go to a playoff and they’d be able to wrap golf up normally, but that definitely didn’t happen. And they couldn’t really have stuck with golf for the playoff; the red-carpet show alone is likely to be significantly higher-rated than the golf, to say nothing of the actual Grammys, and the tournament definitely would have cut into those. (They started at 7:30 p.m. Eastern; the playoff was still going at 8.)

Again, this illustrates the issues with having a lot of big events and not having easily accessible channels to dump starts or bonus coverage to. It’s awesome to have those kinds of rights when everything goes smoothly, but it sure didn’t do that for CBS Sunday.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz