Ratings: Women's U.S. Open Was Not Worth Watching To Much Of An Audience

The rescheduled U.S. Women’s Open ratings reality was obvious to everyone but, apparently, those behind last week’s ill-timed “Women Worth Watching” campaign.

2020 has taught us that sports fans just aren’t into championship golf outside of their normal playing windows. So even though we’ve seen declines for all of the rescheduled majors—with the Masters and U.S. Open taking the biggest plunges—it did not take a doctorate to know that 2020 U.S. Women’s Open ratings would set record lows due to the timing, competition and overall trends.

Not the year to tell everyone Women are worth watching when nothing could reverse the trend. Which made the suffocating rollout of a “brand campaign” perplexing, particularly knowing how many meetings and dollars are spent to orchestrate the pretend-to-be-natural “content” (aka paid filler). The relentless hashtags, paid influencer endorsements, and force integration of the campaign even by media covering the event was all a really cool new thing back in 2018. But in 2020? It came off as desperate and ill-timed. At best. With 3000 Americans dying a day from COVID-19 last week, this would have been a good year for the USGA to remain quiet in the branding onslaught department.

Throw in Golf Channel sticking with the QBE Shootout’s live window when the Friday play was expedited due to forecasted weather, and the women were not even deemed worth watching live by the decision makers who were peddling the inopportune campaign.

Showbuzzdaily reports some of the numbers from A Lim Kim’s stunning win and they are dismal for a major. I’m still searching for Saturday’s third round on NBC and Monday’s rain-delayed finale** on Golf Channel. Sunday’s rainout consisted of a third round replay not noted in the Showbuzzdaily roundup.

**The final round on Golf Channel did not make the top 150 cable shows for Monday, December 14th. A .03 rating was needed to crack the lineup. The previous all-time low final round rating (.5) on Fox occurred last year according to Sports Media Watch.

Shows that beat the rain-delayed final round of the U.S. Women’s Open: