Two months ago, I was shuffling along a desert trail, walking around a group of red rocks, and noticed something strange: I was standing on a golf course.
I could see it in the steep, dazzling stone formations above; in the land that gently bent and nodded in the divine waves of a dogleg; and yes, even in the earth, where a soft, powdery taupe sand filled the path before me and the footbeds of my hiking boots beneath me.
I had a moment that every golfer of a certain age and below a certain threshold of sanity knows: I daydreamed about a golf course.
It wasn’t until several weeks later that I realized that my moment from the middle of the Devil’s Garden trail in Arches National Park wasn’t just mine. One morning I was scrolling through social media when I saw a photo of something eerily familiar in my daydream: a golf hole built into the same landscape, navigating the same stripes I had imagined. The architect was Agustin Piza, and the hole? Well, it was also built in Dreamland, as part of the collection of holes used for TGL Season 2.
If you were to defend what TGL proved in the early days of Season 2, this is probably what you’d say: It proved how pleasure golf can be when golf is not limited to the laws of physics (or the property boundaries of a national park). It has proven that golf appeals to the imagination.
But does the golf fandom agree? This is the most important question facing TGL in its second go-round (and beyond). And it’s the question that led me to review a few key data points from Season 2, which we discuss below.
TGL Data Point 1: Opening Night Ratings
The biggest test the TGL faced in Year 2 was also the first. How would the league perform in the opening broadcast of Season 2? And how would it fare against the coordinated machine of the NFL on a Sunday afternoon?
The answer was… not bad! TGL’s season opener averaged 646,000 viewers in a national timeslot on ABC, down significantly from the 2025 season opener (which drew 919,000 average viewers on Tuesday night on ESPN), but still well above the threshold set by similar network television golf events against the NFL. By comparison, the TGL Season 2 opener drew a larger crowd than the PNC Championship (560,000) and Grant Thornton Invitational (450,000) in comparable time slots.
The context here is especially relevant: TGL’s ratings got off to a relatively strong start to 2025 on ESPN, but faltered as the season progressed, with ratings steadily declining throughout the year. With only one network time slot, it was crucial for the league to show momentum in the opening week of Year 2. The opening week numbers weren’t an absolute hit, but they weren’t enough to raise pointed questions either.
TGL Data Point 2: Week 2 Assessments
I promise this whole The story isn’t about the ratings, but they have an interesting story to tell in the opening weeks of season 2.
TGL’s second match, which saw Rory McIlroy’s Boston Common score its first-ever win, averaged just 354,000 viewers – this time on ESPN2.
While these numbers represent a nearly 50 percent decline from the season opener (en involve perhaps the league’s biggest active star in McIlroy), neither were they completely shock to those paying attention to the data. If SBJJosh Carpenter noted that TGL averaged just a hair above 300,000 average viewers in seven games on ESPN2 in Season 1. Week 2’s ratings represent a modest increase from that number, but nothing particularly notable.
The takeaway? The broadcast location is crucial for the TGL. The better the network and billing planning, the better the ratings. And when the network and scheduling are worse? Well, so are the viewing figures. Of course, most sports leagues would argue that they are just a broadcast network or primetime billing, with no relevance, but TGL seems more sensitive than most leagues in terms of scheduling and broadcast location. For example, the season 2 opening game is significantly larger than LIV’s largest televised audience (484,000 on FOX), but ESPN2 ratings show that the audience will not travel to other networks, time slots and days of the week.
Some of this may be due to TGL’s relative youth: Fans enjoy watching the league if they can easily find it, but they haven’t developed the emotional connection to the league to prove “regular” on many networks. TGL’s ever-changing schedule, networks, and time slots only complicate matters when it comes to building a consistent and reliable audience.
TGL data point 3: The WTGL
With virtually no golf on the calendar (thanks to the Sentry cancellation), TGL has had the advantage of being the only show in town as the calendar has entered the new year. Perhaps the biggest beneficiary of that spotlight, interestingly enough, was the LPGA, which earlier this week announced plans to create a Women’s TGL in 2027.
The advantage of the WTGL is quite clear to those who have listened to even a few minutes of new LPGA Commissioner Craig Kessler. The LPGA is active under Kessler looking for ways to operate in the ‘attention economy’ – and a complementary made-for-TV golf competition with the benefit of showcasing players’ personalities fits Kessler’s vision to a T.
The news also presents an interesting upside for the TGL: If the league can demonstrate its ability to apply the same basic principles to other golf leagues and generate ratings and commercial success, it’s not hard to see how this could apply to other sports, or apply more deeply to the world of golf. (The opportunity for a mixed-gender competition seems too obvious to miss.)
While there is room to disagree about golf need for another league, there is little doubt that more golf is good for everyone, especially when viewed by a wider, younger and more diverse audience.
#tips #TGL #season