The PGA Tour has set the dates of this week's season-opening Hyundai Tournament of Champions Friday through Monday, and I think a Monday finish is a pretty good idea in certain situations.
The final round of golf tournaments on Sunday afternoons while the NFL is playing is pretty useless in regards to television viewership. The NFL rules American sports and it's not worth competing against it on Sundays.
The Monday finish works particularly well on the West Coast and Hawaii, areas where tournaments in the first couple months of the season are held. The tournaments won't generally finish until aboyutu the hours of 8-10 p.m. Eastern, giving much of the country a chance to watch a lot of the final round after work.
The NFL has three weeks left before the Super Bowl.
TV isn't the only thing that has to be considered. Attendance figures and when sponsors want to entertain clients are also key components.
The Monday finish can work attendance-wise at tournament sites in tourist areas, where a lot of the people in the area aren't working. It's a good idea for the fall series as well, after the NFL season has started.
Commissioner Tim Finchem addressed Monday finishes on Golf Channel's The Morning Drive on Thursday. The Deutsche Bank Championship, which finishes on Labor Day, has traditionally been the only event with a Monday finish. He said:
“I think we’re going to watch it and see how it works. At this time of the year, it’s like the fall a little bit. It’s the tail end of the football season. We’re looking to try to work with our terrific television partners, in this case NBC, Comcast, Golf Channel . . . to look at different ways to get these players and what they’re doing to our audience. I think one of the exciting things about this year is we’ll be experimenting with a lot of different things, a lot more stuff online, a lot more digitial content to our fans, and also we’re going to play around with different formats, and this is one of them."
“We’ll watch it, we’ll see how it works, we’ll see how it feels, we’ll see how the fans react to it. If it’s a more compelling and more efficient way to get what these players are doing in front of our fan base it will be a winner. But we’re going to try to do some more experimentation in this area.”
“There are a lot of different factors, it’s not just a television question and a television audience question."
