What To Make Of The Mixed PGA Tour Playoff Ratings News?

Maybe the numbers do not matter with the PGA Tour Playoffs(C) moving to a late-August finish in 2019. Or perhaps a couple of golf-loving Nielsen viewers took the family to the Catskills Northern Trust Open weekend. 

Either way, with Tiger Woods lingering around and getting lots of coverage, the Northern Trust saw a drop in ratings while Labor Day's final Dell Technologies saw a nice boost from Woods. 

From Paulsen at Sports Media Watch:

Final round coverage of the PGA Tour Northern Trust, the first event of the PGA Tour playoffs, earned a 1.9 rating and 2.75 million viewers on CBS Sunday — down 10% in ratings and 12% in viewership from last year (2.1, 3.14M) but up a tick and 5% respectively from 2016 (1.8, 2.63M).

The news was better for Monday's final round at the TPC Boston, where a 2.1 rating was up 8% from 2017 on Tiger's back. The Monday coverage also faced little competition, again making it an attractive coverage day for some other tour to jump on now that the PGA Tour is abandoning Labor Day Monday's going forward. 

Paulsen also updates his Woods Effect numbers from the season with the Northern Trust being just the second tournament to not see an increase. Lead-in numbers are included for Golf Channel and those are also huge, with the 1.34 million average audience for Sunday's coverage.