of others the news of the week – at least in the larger sports world – was not about Saudi funding, but about TV funding. Kind of paid for with your eye and your ability to change between four different channels one week a year.
We’re talking about March Madness.
Even as other real, meaningful basketball playoff games are being played in multiple leagues across the country, our sights are back on — you guessed it — the money. There is a future plan (reportedly a roadblock to approval) to expand the NCAA Tournament from 68 teams to 76, doing so by adding new games to the Tuesday-Wednesday pre-tournament false start of everyone’s favorite tournament. The emphasis, for now and while it lasts, is settled everyone. This tournament has had, at least for my entire sporting life, the same appreciation as the Cubs.
But adding eight teams to the dance isn’t about making college seniors feel better at the end of their athletic careers, nor is it about the simple premise that if some of what you love is good, more is better. It is about commercial inventory. It used to be a 64-team tournament with 63 games in 10 days of basketball. For a decade it was 65 teams, 64 games and 11 days. It then grew to 68 teams and 67 games in 12 days and nights. Soon it will be 76, 75 and 12. Is there any reason to think that 96, 95 and 16 will come in 2032?
How this relates to golf is the same way all professionals (or rather, professionalized) sports are about. You sit down to watch and the promoters hope it will hold your attention for a while, while occasionally the broadcaster is paid by sponsors to interrupt that attention temporarily with advertisements. The broadcaster weighs that money against what it cost them to pay the governing body — in this case the NCAA — for the broadcast rights. It’s a relatively simple formula, but when it works, the numbers call for something more complex: more games and more inventory.
Right now, the golf pro has an inventory mess. It covers your weekend mornings on the DP World Tour, broadcast on the Golf Channel. Afternoons of the PGA Tour are broadcast on NBC or CBS. It has been on the CW and Fox Sports for LIV Golf. And yes, the latest sufferers have their Thursday and Friday early-round viewing (or along with bet-a-thons) via ESPN’s digital streamer. It’s the women’s game, on TV more than ever this year. And seniors, who anchor a lot of the Golf Channel airtime. And the golf simulator on Monday and Tuesday evenings…and so on. One can hardly imagine more pro golf TV inventory, but then TV executives went on a nostalgia hunt and found a buyer for the Skins game on Amazon.
The reason the PGA Tour has been clouded for years by discussions about its product and competitive structure is that it all seemed to fall short of its true potential. (At least partially corroborated by threat posed by LIV Golf.) It felt good-not-good when the peak of the PGAT season looked the same as the tournaments in March and the same as the tournaments in June. Surely more can be gleaned from broadcasting so often the best players on the planet?
And so comes the reality of all sports programming: there’s good inventory and there’s not-so-good inventory. No one knows that more than the man who once had to sell a TV package that included Titans-Jaguars in primetime. Enter PGA Tour CEO and former NFL no. 2, Brian Rolapp.
Determining the difference between good and not-so-good inventory has been a central focus of Rolapp’s first year as CEO of the PGA Tour. He needs to create a better, more efficient, more attractive inventory, and he was hired largely for his ability to do that after 22 years of success with the NFL. The PGA Tour (and golf) is spread out now, fighting small wars on many fronts. Tournament Traditionalists vs. Tournament Investors; Travelers vs. Superstars; time-honored tournaments versus win and loss sheets. Surprisingly, Rolapp commissioned Theo Epstein to play an important role in the Future Racing Committee (FCC). Epstein was one of the main consultants who told baseball owners and the talent they employ, perhaps counterintuitively, that a decline in Past Time at the Ballpark inventory could foster a greater experience for fans, capitalizing on the popularity of the country’s once-beloved pastime. It worked, and there is belief that something similar could work in pro golf, although it will look very different.
If the current tournament structure is 12 or 13 A-level events and 29 or more B-level events – not including majors and Ryder Cups – which add up to a total pot of approximately $1 billion in annual TV revenueRolapp’s model will look more like the following:
-22 Level A events (upgraded with cuts, 120 players and very limited access)
-18 Level B events (with bags bigger than the Korn Ferry Tour)
-Some intangibles (we may call this “C”) which we cannot yet fully account for. Adjustments such as playing matches in the tournament championship and raising the stakes through promotion and tougher relegation. New things that can compel the interest of TV partners.
Rolapp and (most of) his FCC have decided that there is clearly good inventory worth pursuing and that there is not-so-good inventory that they will try and commercialize better without completely hitting the curb (See: the plight of golf in Hawaii).
Diceness comes when you go to your old streaming friends and say: The menu is different and better than ever! while they have been enjoying the same meal at the same table for decades with alternating appetizers but little real change. What will they think?
So let’s reexamine what tracking March Madness inventory means for viewers. Nothing about the in-game experience is likely to change. TV timeouts will continue to exist every four minutes of game time. They have always been enough for a bathroom break. Coaches will no longer take vacations. They will still carry them for the end game. Ad inventory won’t grow during those Thursday and Friday marathons when we all call in “sick” to work. The inventory addition in this case is more akin to a new front porch attached to the same old house, threatening perhaps some of the charm, but squeezing more money out of prospective buyers after an appraisal. (What does this mean for the sanctity of the tour, you can read on other websites.) But the golf pro will do nothing of the sort. Instead, it will change its competitive model so much – to draw on the previous analogy, to refine, redesign the basement of the house, perhaps even deliberately downsizing – that the price of owning it will increase. Increasing costs to broadcasters is not always to the benefit of the league or governing body, because broadcasters (especially on the golf course) have a difficult history of passing those costs on to TV viewers.
That’s the other push here, an old story at this point, that they’ve raised television rights in golf caused broadcasters to force more advertising in the TV viewing experience. It has caused more action interruptions like Playing Through, where the action is muted and pushed into a smaller frame while a loud ad plays across most of the screen. Even the Masters broadcast — long heralded for its dedication to the viewing experience — was criticized this year for what appeared to be an increase in commercialization.
Sports inventory and the commercialization of that inventory (more and more and more) feels like the story of the 2020s, as College Football turned the playoff from 4 teams to 12 to, inevitably, 16. While the NFL added a 17th game and set its sights on the 18th — while selling exclusive rights to a few preseason games on YouTube. While the World Cup saw a 32-team tournament in one country and decided it was better to have a 48-team tournament in three countries. Perhaps the history of the 2030s will analyze which parts of that inventory have been lost too far.
What about PGA Tour inventory? The goal is clearly to course-correct early, plan for the future, make its existing inventory so good that buyers don’t even have to worry about how it was paid for. I’ll understand if you’re skeptical. But I’m optimistic as I gaze across the ruins of LIV Golf at the date on the calendar when Rolapp promised he’d have more to share. The June Travelers Championship, just eight weeks away. Another great tournament where we will have a lot other to talk about.
;)
