CBS revamped a large portion of their golf broadcasting team this winter, including letting longtime analysts Peter Kostis and Gary McCord go.
Still intact: the core team of Jim Nantz and Sir Nick Faldo. CBS takes a lot of criticism for their overall golf production, and Saturday’s coverage of the Farmers Insurance Championship at Torrey Pines was certainly no different.
This is how you know it's a CBS week. Way fewer cameras out there than NBC would have, and they missed the Rahm eagle on 2. And instead of acknowledging the eagle and (which highlights their shortcoming), they pretend it never happened and don't even mention it. Gross.
— No Laying Up (@NoLayingUp) January 25, 2020
Even the players themselves had some fun with it:
Rahm calling out CBS for not getting his eagle on 2! ?
— No Laying Up (@NoLayingUp) January 25, 2020
But, hey, at a certain point covering golf is pretty hard. Maybe not as hard as those involved will jump to tell you it is, but it’s certainly not the easiest sport to produce. None of that lets Faldo off the hook, though; with Johnny Miller retired, he’s now the de facto top analyst in the game, doing work for both CBS and Golf Channel. So it was a rough look when Faldo stumbled through a few different pronunciations of “Collin Morikawa”, none of them correct.
Nantz is all of us here pic.twitter.com/lNDdPCLJ1t
— Jay Rigdon (@jayrigdon5) January 25, 2020
Nantz letting him take three cracks at it before stepping in to save him was, admittedly, tremendous. Morikawa, by the way, is one of the top young players in golf; ranked 55th in the world, he won in just his 6th professional start last year, and he’s never missed a cut as a professional. There’s a chance he ends up on the American Ryder Cup team this fall. It’s also, objectively, not that difficult a name to pronounce, so it might be worth some practice.
