A hush fell over the crowd when Scottie Scheffler’s lead ballooned from four shots to eight on Sunday at the Open Championship at Royal Portrush.
In a hulking building somewhere in the middle of Stamford, Conn., the NBC Sports brass (probably) did the same.
In the vexing, mostly interminable world of sports TV ratings, few words are more terrifying than the one Scheffler employed on Sunday at the Open: Blowout. While it’s well and good for TV when a player of Tiger Woods’ cultural gravitas wins by seven, eight or even 15 shots, it’s mostly horrible for TV when the same happens to basically anybody else. In most instances, a big winner means little drama, and little drama means small TV audiences. Add in Scheffler’s affinity for the kind of tee-to-green-to-tee-again golf that has led so many viewers to term him boring, and you’ve got a dangerous cocktail if you’re part of the NBC group responsible for bringing the Open to the largest possible TV rating number.
From the ground at Portrush, Scheffler’s four-shot Claret Jug win seemed like bad news for the networks. But when the ratings reports arrived on Tuesday afternoon, the truth couldn’t have been more different. Scheffler had delivered a hair more than 4 million average viewers for NBC’s final round telecast, according to SBJ’s Josh Carpenter, a bump of more than 600,000 average viewers from last year’s Xander Schauffele thriller.
The Scheffler/Tiger comparisons have gained steam in recent months, but to the uninitiated, these TV numbers appeared to be the greatest link yet between the two golfers. If a Scheffler blowout could become compelling television by virtue of the golfer winning the tournament, he would enter territory only shared by Woods at his golfing peak. Of course, Scheffler’s audience gains weren’t in the same order of magnitude as Woods, but the broader point held weight: Were we witnessing the creation of a new “needle”?
So, did Scheffler’s victory signal a kind of changing of the guard in pro golf? I’m not sold.
Yes, I believe that the Open ratings benefitted from Scheffler’s standing at the top of the pedestal. He is the best golfer in the world, and word of his dominance has spread far enough to pique the interest of casual sports fans for a crowning Sunday at a major championship. But we’ve also seen rebounding ratings all year long in the golf world, and the numbers from Scheffler’s victory aren’t too far off the 2025 bump pro golf telecasts seem to have received across the board.
In other words, what I’m saying is that I think Scheffler helped the numbers, but I think we’ve got work to do before declaring him the new needle.
The good news, in my opinion, is that the longer Scheffler is his current world-beating self, the more compelling his victories will become. Sports fans love to feel as if they’re witnessing history, and history-altering players are, by nature, good for sports viewership.
The hard part is that Scheffler only recently started on this historic run, making many of these early wins the moments “before” the chase for history. There’s also no guarantee that Scheffler will find himself dominant for as long as characters like Woods and Nicklaus, and the yet-to-be-understood matter of Scheffler’s own ambivalence to the pursuit.
After a “Scottie bump” at the PGA, the Open and a handful of PGA Tour events this year, it’s clear the best player on the planet is helping the sport gain momentum. If the major total gets to, say, eight? Well, it’ll be a whole different conversation then.
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