After reporting 15 minutes and 45 seconds of commercials in an hour on Golf Channel‘s broadcast on day one, fans had every right to hope things would improve, especially after all the complaints. But on Saturday, despite the American team’s effort, hardly anything changed, leaving one too many fans angry.
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Golf Channel broadcast the first hour on day three at Medinah before handing over the duties to NBC, which has 10 hours of coverage. It started at 9:00 AM (ET). Despite the improved numbers, as we will reveal below, the coverage itself did not get better, despite the U.S. team looking to recover from the fall on Friday.
Justin Thomas and Jackson Koivun were one of the most interesting American pairings. Fans couldn’t watch them at all, a frustration shared by Barstool’s Bobby Reagan on X: “There are 16 players on the course right now. We’ve gone over 30 minutes without seeing a live shot from Koivun/JT group. How is it this bad?”
Thomas, who carried a perfect 6-0 record in fourball matches into the week, had just extended it to 7-0-0 by beating Corey Conners and Nico Echavarria 4-and-3 alongside Koivun on Thursday. It was the kind of run that explains why fans were so invested in seeing this pairing again when Snedeker sent them out first on Saturday against Min Woo Lee and Sungjae Im.
With only four matches on the course at once, plenty of fans figured each group would get plenty of screen time. Reagan wasn’t going after Thomas or Koivun; his target was the broadcast itself, and other viewers echoed the feeling of sitting through long stretches waiting for the group they actually wanted to watch. And there might be a reason why this is causing so much trouble for the broadcasters, especially after complaints on Thursday.
After the initial struggle to attract viewers, the television audience surged for day one’s opening round. As per the Nielsen panel-only data, it averaged 688,000 viewers. It’s tough to tell if numbers went up or down on Friday, but fans were definitely counting on good coverage since it’s one of the only big tournaments happening right now.
In fact, Golf Channel’s “Live From the Presidents Cup” recorded 39% increase in viewership compared with Thursday’s at the 2024 Presidents Cup. Fans have complained about the focus on this one feature as well, so it is hard to say how many fans were actually interested in watching it. Not surprisingly, with the way things are going on, fans are left feeling bitter.
Really, the format just wasn’t built for this kind of coverage. This pairing had already given fans plenty to follow, so going more than 30 minutes without showing their group felt like a strange decision. Reagan’s complaint quickly picked up support from other viewers, who pointed to several problems at once.
One fan wrote, “Could just be me, but it has felt like 25 minutes of Playing Through since it switched to NBC #AirTheGolf,” unhappy that the coverage seemed to slip after the handoff from Golf Channel.
Another added, “This broadcast is the worst I’ve ever seen. Cameras [can’t] track the ball half the time.”
A third went after the ad breaks directly, pointing out that big shots kept happening during commercials and only got mentioned after the fact, once the broadcast came back. Several people floated the same fix: save the commercials for when players are just walking between shots, not while the action’s actually happening. Others were annoyed that NBC didn’t even come on until after the first tee shots had already gone off, so viewers were dropped into matches already in progress instead of catching them from the start.
“How hard can it be to have featured groups for 4 matches? I will never understand that,” one fan asked.
Fan after fan kept landing on the same idea: just give us a four-way split screen, a “quad box,” so we can pick which match to watch. The Masters app already does something like this, breaking coverage out by group and hole.
Another put it more bluntly: “Absolutely no flow to the matches for us fans watching. Only 4 groups. You’re telling me we can’t have a channel with 4 boxes and watch whichever match we want? Awful coverage.” Fans felt the technology already exists and should be simple to apply in 2026.
Other viewers suggested better technology to track the ball or a separate channel that shows one match continuously. However, these were only suggestions from fans. The broadcasters had not said that they were testing any of these ideas for this event.
The complaints came at an important point in the tournament. Team USA was behind after a difficult Friday and needed a strong response on Saturday. Thomas and Koivun were part of that effort. Because the match was central to the team’s attempt to reduce the gap, viewers were especially frustrated when they could not watch it continuously.