At first glance, the news that the U.S. Open and other USGA events will return to NBC Sports after Fox Sports ended its 12-year agreement less than halfway through has the feeling of putting the band back together.
Maybe it is but it didn’t start out that way.
The sudden and seismic shift in television partners wasn’t the USGA’s doing.
Critics of Fox Sports’ golf coverage – and there have been many – wasted little time suggesting the USGA had come to its senses in reuniting with NBC Sports, which televised the U.S. Open from 1995 through 2014.
In fact, the change happened recently and stemmed from initial conversations between Fox Sports and NBC Universal about televising the 2020 U.S. Open, which was moved from June to September. That created a programming issue for Fox Sports, which also televises college football, the NFL and Major League Baseball. The first conversations took place during the spring but gained momentum in the past two weeks.
Executives within the Fox Sports golf team were not made aware of the potential change until last Thursday. The rest of the crew, including announcers Joe Buck, Curtis Strange, Paul Azinger, Brad Faxon and others, were not informed until Sunday afternoon.
According to multiple sources, as discussions about NBC taking the 2020 broadcast evolved and NBC Universal showed willingness to assume the deal, Fox Sports executives Eric Shanks and Larry Jones brought the idea of transferring the rights to USGA chief executive officer Mike Davis earlier this month. Davis was apparently unaware of the impending change until the time of that presentation.
Executives within the Fox Sports golf team were not made aware of the potential change until last Thursday. The rest of the crew, including announcers Joe Buck, Curtis Strange, Paul Azinger, Brad Faxon and others, were not informed until Sunday afternoon.
“We were totally blindsided,” one member of the Fox Sports team said.
A top executive at another network told an acquaintance he was stunned by the move.
Under the new agreement, NBC Universal will take over the remaining seven years of the Fox Sports deal, which was signed in 2013 for a reported $1.1 billion and took effect in 2015. The network also will receive digital rights under the revised deal.
As part of the agreement, NBC Universal (which owns Golf Channel and the upcoming Peacock streaming platform) will televise the four scheduled USGA championships this year – the U.S. Women’s Amateur, the U.S. Amateur, the U.S. Open and the U.S Women’s Open – and will televise eight USGA events annually through 2026.
The USGA will continue to receive the same rights fees – reported at $93 million annually – though it is believed Fox Sports will pay a portion of the fee with NBC Universal taking on the rest. It is believed Fox Sports was losing tens of millions of dollars annually on its USGA package and the new agreement gets the company out from under the bulk of what it owed the USGA.
At its annual meeting earlier this year, the USGA revealed it had $211 million in revenue in 2019 with $114 million of that coming from media rights.
The move is another in the changing world of media rights within golf. Earlier this year, the PGA Tour announced new deals through 2030 that increased by more than 60 percent on the previous contracts. Advertising, however, remains a challenge as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.
In returning to NBC Universal, the USGA will be able to have its events on Golf Channel, including a future return to coverage of sectional qualifying (“Golf’s Longest Day”) for the U.S. Open as well as generating Live From programs at the U.S. Women’s Open. With a packed golf schedule in the spring NBC will be able to fully promote the U.S. Open, which was rebranded this year with the tagline “From Many, One.”
“This deal is advantageous for all parties, including NBC Sports, Golf Channel, Peacock and the USGA, but also Fox Sports and we thank them for working with us to complete this transaction,” Pete Bevacqua, president of NBC Sports Group, said in a press release.
While Johnny Miller won’t be in the 18th-hole tower for NBC’s U.S. Open telecasts (he retired in early 2018), Paul Azinger will remain the lead analyst as he was with Fox Sports. That doesn’t mean that Azinger got any more of a heads-up than anyone else.
“It was really a closely guarded secret,” Azinger said. “I had no idea. I got a call (Sunday) night and was caught totally off guard. But the reasoning, as it was explained to me, made sense.”
“While we are proud of the success we’ve built over these years, this is a win for golf fans everywhere, a win for the USGA and a win for Fox and NBC Sports,” Eric Shanks, chief executive officer and executive producer of Fox Sports, said in a release.
NBC Universal now has a long-term agreement with the PGA, as well as agreements to televise the Open Championship and the Ryder Cup. When the USGA parted ways with Comcast, NBC’s parent company, in 2013, it led to a strained relationship between the organizations. At times that resulted in restrained coverage of some USGA events by Golf Channel.
For whatever reason – traditionalists not accepting Joe Buck as the lead announcer, debuting with the Chambers Bay U.S. Open, or just a long-standing affinity for what is familiar – Fox Sports and the U.S. Open never fully connected with the golf-watching public.
It wasn’t for lack of trying or innovation or expertise – analysts Azinger, Strange, Faxon, Juli Inkster and others on the Fox team know their stuff – but five U.S. Open telecasts into what was to have been a 12-year relationship between Fox Sports and the USGA never felt like, say, the Masters on CBS.
Buck drew much of the criticism. On Monday he tweeted: “(Jim) Nantz, (Dan) Hicks, (Mike) Tirico all better at calling golf than me – but I would put our production up against anybody’s. Our innovation and drone shots and overall effort to try new things pushed golf coverage forward and for that I am most proud. Our producer Mark Loomis was a master tutor.”