Shock: PGA Tour Not Much Competition For Football

Feeling super here about my Jason Dufner fantasy pick this week after reading his quote to Karen Crouse in the NY Times that he'd pretty much rather be anywhere but the "playoffs" at East Lake. Not surprisingly, Dufner dewsweeps with Tiger Friday, or whatever it is early birds do in a 30 player field.

Crouse takes on the topic of playoff golf against football and even the players sound distracted by the curious timing of the golf playoffs against a sports calendar stocked with events more Americans would rather watch. And watching elsewhere, they are though I expected worse numbers:

“Golf fans are always going to watch golf no matter if football’s going on or not,” he said. “But you’re going to have a tough time pulling guys away from watching their favorite universities, their favorite N.F.L. teams, during this time of year. I don’t think us doing the playoffs really has that much of an impact on it.”

Aided by a late charge from Woods, who finished one stroke behind Scott, the final-round coverage of the Barclays, the first event of the PGA Tour FedEx Cup, earned a 3.7 overnight rating on CBS, up from 2.7 last year. Nielsen figures showed the final round of the Deutsche Bank Championship, the next event, had 3.2 million viewers on NBC, down 34 percent from 2012, when the final round was the most-viewed FedEx Cup telecast since 2007.

Golf Channel’s coverage of Furyk’s sub-60 round drew an audience of just under 1.1 million.

No mention of the Web.com Tour Finals (WTF!).