Brandel Chamblee is no fan of LIV Golf. That much has been proven time and time and time again ever since the Saudi-funded breakaway tour fractured professional golf.
LIV Golf held their season ending championship event this past weekend, won by $350 million man Jon Rahm. And once again, very few people tuned in to watch. LIV drew a microscopic 89,000 viewers on the CW up against the NFL. In fact, they were far from the most watched golf event on Sunday. That honor went to the Solheim Cup, which drew over 7x the viewership at 657,000 viewers.
So naturally, Chamblee took the opportunity to pull out the big stick and take another swing at LIV, saying it “remains in the witness protection program of sports viewership.”
Despite billions of dollars for golf megastars, LIV remains in the witness protection program of sports viewership. Partly because they are trying to “scale” the county-fair motleyness of the 16th hole at the WM Phoenix Open and the Seve-like passion of the RyderCup, they fail,… https://t.co/OCoUdPKtLB
— Brandel Chamblee (@chambleebrandel) September 18, 2024
Unfortunately for the PGA Tour, their TV number actually fell below LIV for what might be the first time ever. The final round of the ProCore Championship, the first event of the Fall series, managed only 69,000 viewers. Incomprehensibly, that number is lower than the Golf Channel daily viewership average. If LIV is in the witness protection program, the PGA Tour’s Fall series may have faked its own death.
Of course, several caveats exist in that the Fall series isn’t part of the regular PGA Tour calendar that ends with the Tour Championship and featured a leaderboard full of names that might be foreign to even the most dedicated golf fans. A more direct comparison for the LIV season finale would be the Tour Championship itself, which drew 2.7 million viewers back in August. There’s a reason why the PGA Tour chose wisely to end the main season before the NFL kicked off.
The missives back and forth don’t change the overall reality – professional golf is suffering across the board. PGA Tour ratings are down, nobody watches LIV, and the merger that is supposed to bring the game back together is moving along at a snail’s pace. With that reality, it’s hard to find a winner anywhere.
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