Now that the NBA Finals have finally wrapped up, we’ve reached the truly dead part of the sports season in the United States. For the next month or so, no single sport will dominate the hearts and minds of American television viewers.
Major League Baseball is approaching its All-Star break in mid-July, as is the WNBA. Wimbledon begins next week. For soccer fans, there are the Gold Cup and the Club World Cup, which will take place until mid-July. The NASCAR season is still trudging along. But none of those events are so domineering as to overshadow the others.
Until the NFL’s preseason starts in August, the sports calendar remains wide open. Realistically, there are nearly two full months of summertime where very few sporting events of consequence are taking place.
July and August should be times for niche sports to capitalize on the limited competition. But so far, few have done a great job.
The PGA Tour is perhaps the best-positioned of any smaller sports league to capitalize on this summertime lull. For most of the country, July and August is peak golf season from a participatory standpoint. The sport is at the forefront of many Americans’ minds. However, aside from the final major of the year, The Open Championship in the United Kingdom, golf is entering one of its weakest stretches of the schedule across the entire calendar year.
On Sunday, the PGA Tour played its final signature event of the year at the Travelers Championship. The product was great. Keegan Bradley and Tommy Fleetwood entered the 72nd hole with everything to play for. The finish was thrilling, and the tournament’s viewership backed that up. 3.52 million viewers tuned in for the final round, the second-largest audience for that event in 22 years.
For the uninitiated, the PGA Tour’s signature events gather the best players on the tour in limited-field, no-cut events. They were introduced as a direct response to LIV Golf, aiming to bring together the best crop of golfers to compete against one another more frequently. They’ve proven largely successful from a viewership standpoint. It turns out that when the world’s top golfers compete against each other simultaneously, people are more interested in watching.
That’s why it makes no sense that the last of eight signature events on the schedule took place on Sunday. Instead of backloading its schedule with signature events during the most empty part of the American sports calendar, the PGA Tour has none at all.
Sure, it’s not entirely the PGA Tour’s fault. They can’t control when The Open is played. There’s also the Scottish Open the week prior, which takes a second week off the board. Those are two great golf tournaments that fans love. However, with no single signature event scheduled between June 22, when the Travelers concluded, and August 7, when the FedEx Cup Playoffs begin, this seems like an oversight.
Instead, some of the weaker fields of the year will be competing at a time when the PGA Tour could really take advantage of the summer lull.
To the Tour’s credit, they have improved the schedule in recent years. The FedEx Cup Playoffs no longer overlap with the NFL season, unlike they did until 2019. And there’s now a clear delineation between the regular season and the fall swing season.
But there’s still room for improvement. The NFL might be the best example of this. That league doesn’t stop optimizing its television schedule just because it’s the most popular viewership sport in the country. They continue to find new ways to innovate, adding more standalone windows and maximizing their audience. Perhaps the PGA Tour, under its new CEO Brian Rolapp, a longtime NFL media executive, will find ways to do the same. Strategically placing its signature events in advantageous parts of the sports calendar is one way to do so.
One of the unfortunate consequences of the signature event model is that it renders non-signature events secondary. And, to be honest, they are. The fields are watered down, and only a handful of the world’s best show up.
The PGA Tour should be building up to its playoff events in August, not backtracking into them, as it is with this year’s schedule. That’s especially the case when there are so few other sports to compete with.
Of course, the world of professional golf has plenty of bigger fish to fry. Sprinkling a couple of signature events into the next six weeks probably ranks pretty low on the list of priorities. But it’s a missed opportunity nonetheless. And for a sport like golf, which already fights an uphill battle against more popular sports for much of the season, these are the key growth opportunities that shouldn’t be passed up.
The PGA Tour should be fighting against the summer lull, not contributing to it.