After Rory McIlroy’s victory at the Masters, Kevin Kisner made a guest appearance at the Barstool Sports’ Fore Play Podcast to break down the week that was.
The nearly two-hour chat covered a lot of bases: Rory’s triumph, Scottie Scheffler and Justin Rose’s near misses and other big moments. But when the discussion returned to the air, Kisner went on a viral, expletive-laden rant about what he believed were CBS’ shortcomings.
“I have a very biased opinion, so I want to go ahead and put that out there before I start because I work for the other network,” Kisner began. “And I was so confused the whole time trying to keep up with CBS sources behind the scenes. They’re literally showing s— that I knew happened ten minutes ago all day. It was so bad I actually texted Colt Knost during the show and said: ‘Have you all ever shown a live shot?’ I’d rather follow the f—ing app than follow your feed.’”
“So your whole coverage of the Masters is a fantasy world. It’s bulls-t,” Kisner continued. “Whatever we’re all watching already happened seven minutes ago. Can you imagine watching the Super Bowl and saying, ‘Oh yeah, Tom Brady threw that touchdown seven minutes ago, we’re going to act like it was live here so our announcers can sound really smart and we’re going to sit here and he’s going to throw it all open in the stadium seven minutes ago.’ What are you doing, man?”
Kisner, who became a lead golf analyst for NBC in 2024, was on hand Augusta National working as lead analyst for Sirius XM’s Masters broadcast team. Beyond serving as a rousing post-Masters commentary piece, his comments were highly unusual for a man serving as an employee of one of the PGA Tour’s broadcast partners, who rarely, if ever, aired public criticism of each other.
“You don’t have ads,” Kisner said. “Play live footage. I don’t know. Our production team at NBC prides itself on playing any footage they can live. And we talk to Dan Hicks, when we can’t, we have to say a little bit ahead of time because we’re trying to make the whole movie make sense, right? We don’t want to show you a tap on 16, 16, 16, 16. It’s clear that he doesn’t know what they are doing.
On Thursday, Kisner returned to the Fore Play podcast to apologize.
“It’s been an interesting couple of days, but it is what it is,” Kisner said. “I just have to apologize to the golf team at CBS. I crossed the line maybe, too much talking about all this content. And I know from my short time in the business how wild production is, right? It’s a very difficult thing to produce a live show and make it all work and everyone does their best.
“NBC fails all the time, and we’re just trying to do our best, and I went too far in being critical of them, and I just want all the people associated with it to know that I’m sorry,” he continued. “They are our partners with the PGA Tour and they continue to showcase the game that we all love in a great way, and everyone is trying to do their best and I was very critical of them.”
You can watch Kisner’s apology in the video above or the Fore Play podcast episode in its entirety. here.
