Jay Monahan said the PGA Tour TV numbers aren’t as bad as they seem, but what did he really mean?
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Jay Monahan is by most accounts a good guy. But even the good guys sometimes have to trade tricks.
Like, for example, during the second act of your twice-yearly media availability, assessing the state of your employer’s business, when a reporter has just asked you a particularly pointed question. Ethics and morality say that you should try to answer the question honestly, but about a billion years of public relations research shows that it’s better not to answer at all.
So you create an answer that sounds a bit like what Jay Monahan said Wednesday morning at the Tour Championship when the PGA Tour commissioner was asked about his feelings on The tournament’s free-falling TV ratings. Not a complete lie, but a clever spin.
“I think when you look at 2024, it’s important to note, and I will note, that the overall consumption on our platforms in total has increased,” Monahan said, straight-faced. “This bodes really well for the PGA Tour and the engagement we have with our fans.”
If you understand the nature of TV ratings chatter, you can only appreciate the variability of this response. To Monahan’s point, perhaps “general consumption” indeed IS up “in total”. Sounds like great news. But the even better news is that few people know what the overall consumption of the PGA Tour is and NOBODY know how these metrics relate to tournament dollars earned. In other words, it’s a way to claim a relatively face-to-face victory damning evidence to the contrary.
We care about TV ratings because they help us understand why networks pay such exorbitant amounts to broadcast sports. Big audiences mean more ad money, which is the start of the unholy cycle of the TV business (more ad dollars means more value, and more value equals more money transferred to leagues in exchange for their rights). Declining audiences, on the other hand, mean trouble.
And rest assured, trouble is coming for the PGA Tour in the world of TV ratings. In his question to Monahan, Josh Carpenter i SBJ suggested that one of the tournament’s television partners had seen ratings decline by “15 to 17 percent” from 2023. After years of flat or slightly declining ratings, 2024 marked an unpleasant experience with viewership free-falling, which Turi would very much like to avoid repeating.
Does all of this mean Monahan was lying when he suggested the PGA Tour’s overall consumption was up? Not exactly. It means he wasn’t deliberately addressing the truth, which is that the PGA Tour’s television partners have seen close to a fifth of their audience disappear in 2024. And when TV partners see a fifth of their audience theirs to disappear, that doesn’t happen’ It doesn’t matter if the PGA Tour’s consumption data reveals the Zodiac. It’s bad news for the tour, for golf, for the networks – for everyone.
Now some important qualifiers. Yes, TV viewership is slowly declining due to the decline of cable television. Yes, audience measurements are changing every year to more accurately capture those who have moved away from cable TV but still watch live TV. And yes, the PGA Tour had seen several years of steady ratings during LIV’s early years, which means we can’t immediately assume that the decline in viewership is related to the Saudi rift rather than at least partly due to, say , a host of other issues like scheduling and bad weather and weird audience behavior and cable TV the slow march of death.
Monahan made some of those points Wednesday, also announcing the creation of a fan feedback program aimed at testing and implementing fan-promoted streaming solutions on PGA Tour telecasts. (No word from the Tour if they’ll consider “less advertising” sufficient feedback.)
“Nielsen itself is currently looking at its system and will be announcing changes to its system,” Monahan said, before moving on to another favorite word. “When you look at the reach on the PGA Tour, when this comes out, you’ll likely see a double-digit increase in reach from the PGA Tour as they’ve been able to dig further into the intelligence that they’re now able to get through their partners others.”
These are all good points, all fair defenses of a business that’s probably not as bad as the coverage of skyrocketing TV ratings suggests (of which this column already makes plenty). But we actually BELIEVE Jay Monahan when he says he’s not too worried about TV ratings?
Surprisingly, and only for the time being, yes.
Monahan is obviously obfuscating the truth in the hopes that he can distract from it really bad numbers and in some of them less –the bad ones. He obviously understands that Nielsen is not to blame for his 2024 golf tournament’s declining ratings, because if Nielsen were to blame, any other show on television would have fallen by similar margins. He seriously does not believe CONSUMER AND reach are more valuable quantifiers than television audiences.
But he understands the most important part of the TV ratings gambit, which is that nothing matters in the middle of a contract. The PGA Tour is tied to NBC and CBS until the end of the decade by two separate, very large amounts of paper: several billion dollars and hundreds of pages of legalese. So much is not changing. And until it’s time to start negotiating rights again, likely sometime in ’28 or ’29, it won’t change.
For Monahan to undermine the Tour’s position by calling out his year of terrible TV ratings is an own goal not worth taking. The pay is the same no matter what it says. The same goes for the network’s TV partners, so we’ve heard nothing but words of support and to some extent dismissalabout complaints with low ratings.
For the golfing public to obsess over the same TV ratings is an own goal of similar proportions, if a little more understandable. The numbers smelt as if they matter, especially now. For better or worse, the only quantifiable battlegrounds in the war between the PGA Tour and LIV exist in the major championships and the Nielsen guide. If the numbers are down, they should average something, especially when these numbers confirm our existing feelings of existential dread.
The truth is, numbers mean something, likely a little less than you’ve allowed yourself to believe. The PGA Tour probably won’t be dumped by its television partners or sold for scrap before its contract expires, meaning the tour has several years, if not more, before today’s public concerns about become a major cause of cowardice in the conference room.
The news is not good. Dropping 15 percent in one year is like losing 15 games in the first half of an NBA season. We’re approaching the All-Star break, but it’s not too late to turn things around.
Be concerned, be LOT worried if you will. Just don’t be surprised when Jay Monahan tells you it isn’t.
You can contact the author at james.colgan@golf.com
