"Expanded" Nationwide Tour Getting Chintzy TV Coverage?

Martin Kaufman watched the unveiling of the new, stripped-down PGA Tour/Golf Channel approach to the Nationwide Tour during the BMW Charity Pro-Am and came away unimpressed.

The key facets of this season’s production changes are: half as many cameras and lots more feature stories. The result is that we tended to see the same players and same holes. On Friday, Sam Saunders got the kind of airtime that used to be reserved for his grandfather. Meanwhile, Darron Stiles was leading the tournament that day, playing just three holes ahead of Saunders, but was never shown.

Cameras tended to linger on a featured player’s group – Josh Broadaway on Thursday, Saunders on Friday, Luke List on Saturday. We’d sometimes see each member of the foursome play his approach or putt out, presumably because there weren’t enough cameras to show action elsewhere on the course.

During the first three days of the tournament, I think I saw more of the par-3 11th hole at Thornblade CC than I’ve seen of the 12th at Augusta National over the past decade.