The first TGL broadcast drew an average of 919,000 viewers on ESPN.
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TGL is officially off the ground, and the same can be said for its TV ratings.
The new Golf Simulator League aired to an average of 919,000 viewers on ESPN Tuesday night, a strong but not shocking total for its first telecast, according to SBJs Austin Karp and first reported by the X handle (formerly Twitter). @YeahClickClack. Notably, the TGL telecast was up 200,000 viewers on average over the same time period a year ago and drew a larger audience than its headliner, the Pitt-Duke basketball game, showing that golf fans tuned into ESPN especially to see the new league.
If you’re a TV-obsessed golf fan feeling somewhat taken aback by these numbers — either way — we don’t blame you. TGL’s numbers placed them almost perfectly between the rough averages for LIV telecasts on the CW and PGA Tour telecasts on CBS and NBC. Does this tell us anything concrete about the new league compared to its tournament counterparts?
The answer is no. TV ratings are inherently subjective and it’s too early to compare TGL to its tournament counterparts. The best way to know the success of a league is to compare it against itselfand to control for as many variables as possible. Is the audience growing or shrinking over time? And if so, for how much? Can the difference in audience be attributed to cable vs. broadcast vs. broadcast TV? Of course, change over time is the only data point that we not have for TGL, which is part of what will make the next few weeks of ratings reports so critical to its continued success.
Still, there are things to learn from the Week 1 ratings, and I’ll try to distill some of the highlights below.
First, I would say that these ratings qualify as a little better than expected. On a scale from “smash-hit” to “total flop,” I’d place TGL’s first-week audience almost squarely in the middle, perhaps tipping a few marks in the positive direction. A few days ago, I predicted close to 700,000 average viewers for TGL as a solid baseline for Week 1, basing that prediction off of ESPN’s monthly averages, which hover around 800,000 this time of year. TGL benefits from being broadcast in primetime, when the audience size should be much larger. I figured the favorable timing would be negated by the newness of the league and the absence of the league’s most critical stars from Week 1, and I felt bad about the overall numbers after Game 1 ended in a blowout. (Ratings are the average number of viewers watching in each minute of a telecast, and these numbers may be affected as viewers tune in LOT early because of an explosion, or when viewers lose attention because of a heavy commercial sequence — two things could have happened in the final hour on Tuesday.)
If you’re a TGL optimist, you’ll likely point to Week 1’s lack of star power and blowout as reasons why we can expect the numbers to jump from here, especially with Tiger Woods competing in Week 2 tomorrow on ESPN . hosts the biggest telecast of the year, the NFL Wild Card Game. I would agree to that. in ARE will likely have a bigger Week 2 audience, and in the bigger picture, there’s reason to be excited: the telecast moved quickly, the players contributed game-wise, and the overall reaction to the league was supportive. It’s also impressive that the league managed to wrangle the first week’s numbers without a strong edge from the basketball game.
But it is important to clarify this optimism it’s not the same as safety — and we’re still many ratings reports away from certifying TGL’s success. The league still needs to prove it can generate TV audiences when its novelty wears off, and it needs to show it can turn the Tiger/Wild Card tailwinds into viewership for, say, the Atlanta Drive vs. The Bay on Feb. 17 . That’s a big ask, and the jury will be out until the reviews tell us otherwise.
For now, the news is good. We can safely say after week 1 that TGL is not an instant flop. We can agree that the first set of numbers is good and they can still be improved. But we have to temper that optimism with a dose of reality: Long-term growth in TV ratings is still the league’s single biggest challenge, and we know it. nothing what these numbers will look like in a few weeks.
In other words, keep your eyes clear. Answers coming soon. Just not today.
