Jim Nantz will have an extra hour on the air during CBS’ coverage of the 2025 Masters.
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Underneath all the hype about Augusta National’s green jacket lies a funny truth.
There is no televised event in golf – and probably no televised event in professional sports – that’s it as accessible as the Masters. While the tournament prides itself on its well-earned atmosphere of exclusivity, consumer The Master is approaching PBS comfort levels. While the tournament has traditionally only aired for nine weekend hours on CBS (a worthless by PGA Tour standards), cameras capture every painstaking second of tournament week for coverage that streams over the Masters’ suite of hands-free digital and mobile apps.
That’s why, perhaps, the golfing public offers only lukewarm criticism of the Masters’ relatively restrictive television window each year. Sure, it would be nice to see more of the Masters on CBS, but it’s not that hard to watch the action basically anywhere else.
Thankfully, even the most vocal critics will have one less thing to complain about in 2025. On Tuesday, Augusta National and CBS announced five more hours of television coverage from the first major golf spectacle of the new year, including an additional hour of weekend television coverage during the Saturday afternoon network window.
The main part of the expansion comes on CBS Saturday, which will now air from 2-7pm ET both days of the weekend, expanding the network’s total number of television hours to 10. The network will also get two additional hours of broadcast coverage on Paramount Plus before the start of CBS coverage on Saturday and Sunday.
The news gives the Masters its most extensive television schedule ever, the latest development in what has been a decades-long march of television growth for the famously reclusive club. Just three decades ago, television viewers never saw as much as Augusta National’s famed front nine — now, in what has become almost routine, they’re conditioned to expect wall-to-wall coverage on a host of networks. , mediums and days … with limited commercial breaks.
The steady growth of Augusta National’s entertainment offerings has been going on behind the scenes for years, but now golf fans have no reason to look far. The Masters app is considered by many within the sports biz to be the industry standard as an entertainment offering, and in 2024 the club even released the first iteration of the Masters VR app, for use with the Apple Vision Pro headset.
In a vacuum, these changes mean very little, but as a whole they speak to something bigger for the Masters on TV – an effort to bring them closer to golf’s biggest event than ever before.
Now it’s just a matter of waiting six months until we see them in action.
