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Spin the numbers: Telling different story of ratings for U.S. Open

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The narrative for this year’s U.S. Open was that the ratings were at historic lows.

From Sports Media Watch:

Fox Sports’ first ever U.S. Open ended with near-record low numbers.

Final round coverage of the U.S. Open earned a 4.2 final rating and 6.7 million viewers on FOX Sunday, up 40% in ratings and 46% in viewership from last year’s record-low (3.0, 4.6M), but down 22% and 20%, respectively, from 2013 (5.4, 8.4M). Compared to previous West Coast editions of the U.S. Open, ratings and viewership declined 30% from 2012 (6.0, 9.6M) and 28% from 2010 (5.8, 9.3M).

From Paul Dougherty of the Albany Times-Union:

The final round of the U.S. Open golf tournament, played in prime time on the East Coast, delivered a 4.8 overnight Nielsen rating on Fox, perhaps a bit of a disappointment considering the closeness of Jordan Spieth’s victory at Chambers Bay.

The rating is 27 percent lower than the final round in 2012 (6.6), the last time the final round aired in prime time, and 44 percent lower than the prime-time airing in 2008, when Tiger Woods forced a Monday playoff against Rocco Mediate (8.5).

OK, but there’s more to the story.

For starters, the 4.2 rating is the average for all of Fox’s coverage on Sunday. Fox was on the air for more than 10 hours. It came on at 2 p.m. Eastern, when Jordan Spieth was finishing breakfast in Seattle. It was four hours before the final group went off the first tee. The early ratings were low, not surprisingly, affecting Fox’s overall average.

Meanwhile, NBC only had six hours of primetime coverage for the 2012 U.S. Open at Olympic in San Francisco. It wasn’t as spread out, and thus had a higher overall average.

According to Fox, on a total minutes viewed basis, the 2015 U.S. Open beat 8 of the last 10 U.S. Opens.

Here’s another KEY point: Tiger Woods was long gone from Chambers Bay on the weekend. That wasn’t the case at the previous West Coast Opens.

In 2012, Woods was tied for the lead going into the third round. Even though he stumbled with a 75 on Saturday, he still had potential to bounce back on that Sunday.

In 2010 at Pebble Beach, Woods and Phil Mickelson were in the hunt going into the back 9 and eventually finished fourth. And everyone knows the story of what Woods did at the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines.

Bottom line: When Woods is a factor in any tournament, there is a ratings spike of 50 percent, maybe more, especially for a major. So you’re not looking at an apples-to-apples situation in the context of comparing 2015’s tournament to previous West Coast Opens.

One more point: Sunday’s final-round broadcast peaked with 11.2 million viewers from 10:00–10:30 p.m. ET as audiences watched Spieth birdie the 18th hole and runner-up Dustin Johnson finish with his fatal three-putt.

That is a huge number for golf and bodes well for the game. While Spieth isn’t close to pushing the needle like Woods does, he has the potential to get there.

Anyway, just another way to spin the numbers.

 

 

Bob Ryan to receive prestigious Red Smith Award: ‘Secret is to cover great teams’

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An excerpt of my latest column for Poynter on Bob Ryan:

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Ryan also struck an immediate bond with Larry Bird. John Havlicek asked him to assist on his autobiography. He calls Dave Cowens “the most interesting character I ever encountered in sports.” The former Boston center asked Ryan to help write his retirement announcement.

Ryan immersed himself in the beat by closely monitoring practices and expanding his education over discussions with players and coaches. He earned their credibility and respect. He treasures a statement in which Bird once said, “Bob Ryan could be a coach.”

“Baseball and basketball are my passions,” Ryan said. “I’ve always felt very comfortable in that world. I always was able to convey an enthusiasm and an eagerness to listen and learn. I couldn’t get enough.”

Another key, Ryan said, was doing his homework in getting to know the people he covered.

“I always was well-versed on their backgrounds,” Ryan said. “I tried to ask question that reflect that. It is a way to open the door. This information is available to everyone. Frankly, I don’t think everyone does it.”

Ryan also added another essential element to his success.

“The secret is to cover good teams,” Ryan said.

Indeed, it helped Ryan immensely that several of the Celtics teams he covered were among the best in NBA history. In his 2014 autobiography “Scribe,” Ryan admitted that he always wanted those teams to win.

Ryan took some heat for that perspective since it is a sharp disconnect with the sportswriter mantra of “no cheering in the press box.” Sports Illustrated even said Ryan “blurred the line between fan and journalist.”

Ryan insists that’s not the case. He just feels better teams produce more compelling stories.

“I don’t understand why (beat writers) don’t want their teams to win,” Ryan said. “Life is better when the team is winning. I don’t believe there is such a thing as being objective. Everyone writes subjectively. It’s about the fairness in everything you right. That’s what matters: Being fair.”

 

 

What will he say? Pete Rose next appearance on Fox Sports 1 is July 1

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I have a feeling there will be a bit more interest than usual in Fox Sports 1’s studio coverage of baseball on July 1.

Richard Deitsch of SI.com reports that despite the new developments, Pete Rose remains a part of the Fox’s team.

I emailed Fox Sports on Monday night for comment on ESPN’s Rose story. Here is their statement:

“FOX Sports has no comment on the recent news pertaining to Pete Rose other than his status as a guest baseball analyst for FOX Sports 1 is unchanged. Pete is next scheduled to appear on America’s Pregame, MLB Whiparound and FOX Sports Live on July 1.” 

Why not? The show likely will be the first time Rose addresses allegations that he bet on baseball as a player.

 

 

An addition for Colin Cowherd: Jen Lada to join show

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Jen Lada is leaving Comcast Sports Net Chicago to join ESPN, where she will be featured as a contributor on Colin Cowherd’s radio show.

While her exact role hasn’t been determined, Lada said she is looking forward to giving her perspective on issues and news in sports. She got a taste with multiple appearances on the “Kap & Haugh” show on CSN and WGN Plus.

“The great thing about Colin’s shows is that they go beyond the surface level and try to figure out why something is happening,” Lada said. “I’ve met with Colin. He’s great. We get along really well. This is a great opportunity to mix it up a bit.”

In addition to Cowherd’s show, Lada also will make appearances on “SportsCenter” and on other ESPN studio shows. She will join the network in August.

Lada said it was a difficult decision to leave Comcast Sports Net. The native of McHenry joined the network in 2013, serving as a reporter and anchor.

“I always dreamed of covering the teams I grew up with,” Lada said. “It’s also been enjoyable to see my son take a liking to those teams. It took a lot of soul-searching, but this provides me with an opportunity to get better with what I do and to challenge myself in the process.”

Fox suffers through shaky debut in U.S. Open

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My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana.

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I covered 12 U.S. Opens for the Chicago Tribune, and I came away with a headache from each one.

The cranky level always is at the highest levels. The five-hour-plus rounds leave everyone drained. The players are perpetually ticked off with the United States Golf Association’s wacky set-up. It wasn’t just last week at Chambers Bay. Check out the complaints from the first U.S. Open at Bethpage in 2002 and when the USGA lost the greens at Shinnecock in 2004.

As for the press, the logistics usually are challenging, and we live in constant fear of having to cover a Monday playoff. I imagine the press room delivered the biggest cheer at Chambers Bay when Dustin Johnson missed that putt at 18 Sunday.

It isn’t just the players and media. The U.S. Open also has viewers reaching for Tylenol. It’s just that kind of tournament.

From that perspective, Fox Sports really had no chance in airing its first U.S. Open. No matter what the network did, the transition from 20 years of the NBC’s coverage wasn’t going to be met fondly.

The reaction was the equivalent of Joe Buck and Greg Norman standing in the middle of the driving range with no protection. Prior to the tournament, I told Fox Sports officials to stay away from social media. I hope they heeded my advice, because it wasn’t pretty.

A few samples:

@breitwieser:  People are very divided on Fox Sports coverage of the U.S Open. Some people hated it and others truly hated it.

‏@Sskoneki: Can we start a kickstarter account to buy the U.S. Open from Fox and give it back to NBC?

@iveyjanette_207: Jim McKay,Pat Summerall and Henry Longhurst are all turning in their graves right now…Fox’s U.S. Open coverage is #brutal.

Now was Fox’s coverage that bad? No. Can it be improved? OH, YES.

For starters, Buck and Norman were fine. I know people like to dump on Buck, but he generally did a good job directing traffic and setting the stage.

Norman, meanwhile, delivers that big-name presence to the telecasts. He’s “The Shark,” after all, and I found myself interested in what he had to say. He wasn’t Johnny Miller, but he offered some illuminating perspectives.

As for the other commentators, I liked to talk to Brad Faxon as a player. So naturally, I liked him in the booth. Corey Pavin also was better than I expected, given he was really dry as the 2010 U.S. Ryder Cup captain.

The biggest complaint I had, as did others, is that too often I had no idea who was talking beyond Buck and Norman. These are new voices and Fox needed to do a better job of identifying its announcers.

From a gizmo standpoint, many of the new graphics, including the distances and tracers, were nice additions. The score bug in the right corner seems so logical, it is hard to believe nobody has done it before. The amped-up sound picked up Jordan Spieth on Friday proclaiming the 18th hole as a par 4 was “dumbest hole I’ve ever played.” That became a story, perhaps prompting the USGA to play the hole as a par 5 on Sunday.

However, there were more than a few bogeys. The biggest was a feeling that the overall production seemed disjointed. There were several glitches and a general lack of seamless flow that viewers have come to expect from NBC and CBS.

There were some baffling decisions on the climatic 18th hole Sunday. Instead of breaking down Dustin Johnson’s all-important second shot from the fairway, Fox inexplicably went to an interview with Louis Oosthuizen. Why? Sorry, but nobody cared about Oosthuizen at that moment. As a result, Fox quickly had to cut to Johnson as he stepped to the ball.

Also, Fox dropped the ball on Johnson’s epic miss. What happened? Why did he rush that putt? How about some replays? Oh, to have heard from Miller at that point.

There is no need to hear again from Holly Sonders or Curt Menefee on these telecasts. Sonders’ post-round interviews were painful, as she was woefully over her skis. She is going to have a tough time living down asking Jordan Spieth if he bought a fifth outfit for a possible playoff that didn’t happen.

Menefee did a poor job faking that he doesn’t know anything about golf. Fox badly needs someone like the Golf Channel’s Rich Lerner, who is well-versed in the game and its history, in the studio role.

Despite all the social media slams, Fox isn’t going anywhere. It has 11 more U.S. Opens with its USGA deal. Deal with it.

Fox will make adjustments. Telecasts evolve over time, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if the network’s coverage of the 2020 U.S. Open is markedly different from 2015.

If not, Tylenol should consider taking out ads during future U.S. Opens. Viewers will need something for those headaches.

 

 

What Fox needs to do for next U.S. Open

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Thanks to Richard Deitsch at SI.com for including me in this column. He asked veteran golf watchers to make suggestions on how to improve its U.S. Open coverage.

Here’s what I wrote:

Forget about the individuals, although Holly Sonders showed she isn’t ready for prime time. The biggest item on Fox’s to-do list is addressing the overall production. Too often, the telecasts felt disjointed. There were several glitches, way too many baffling decisions, and a general lack of seamless flow that viewers have come to expect from NBC and CBS.

For instance, NBC golf producer Tommy Roy isn’t showing an interview with Louie Oosthuizen with Dustin Johnson getting ready to hit the paramount approach on 18. Viewers would have gotten Johnny Miller’s complete breakdown of the shot.

There is a steep learning curve in airing an unwieldy event like a U.S. Open. Fox and producer Mark Loomis need to learn quickly if they want to step up their game for the 2016 U.S. Open.

And from some of the others. Neil Best of Newsday:

First of all, Fox should keep all of the technical gizmos and gimmicks it rolled out, with some tweaks, because most or all of them worked, especially the enhanced on-course audio. Joe Buck proved he can toggle from football and baseball to golf seamlessly, but he might have to be a tad more hands-on guiding a hodgepodge crew of analysts in the right journalistic direction. Greg Norman, the lead analyst, has the personality and knowledge to make a go of this, but he’ll need to learn to speak up at important times. For example when a guy faces a putt on the 72nd hole to win the U.S. Open, then faces a putt to tie the U.S. Open, then faces a putt to lose the U.S. Open.

Dick Friedman, SI Golf Plus.

Better casting. You need not only strong, distinctive views but also strong, distinctive voices. Most important: You need a foil for Greg Norman (and it shouldn’t be Joe Buck, who has enough to do). A big part of NBC’s success was having Roger Maltbie (or Gary Koch) stand up to Johnny Miller, often humorously. On munis all over America, hackers amuse themselves imitating Johnny and Rog: “Looks like it breaks right about three feet, Rog.” “Well, John, actually it goes left about six feet.” (Doesn’t take much to make us hackers crack ourselves up.)

Front pages: Spieth rewards Dallas Morning News with victory

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Last week, I did a column for Poynter on how the Dallas Morning News was wrestling with whether it should send its golf writer to cover hometown kid Jordan Spieth in the majors. Money is tight and the Morning News hadn’t attended a major since 2011.

However, after not being at Augusta for Spieth’s victory in the Masters, Bill Nichols was sent to Seattle for the U.S. Open. It proved to be a good move.

Now will the Morning News staff Spieth at the British Open in St. Andrews? Answer coming soon.

Sports media Friday: How the New York Times broke Cardinals computer hack story; review of HBO’s Ballers

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Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media:

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New York Times sports editor Jason Stallman tells Brendan Marks of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the background on breaking the story that the Cardinals allegedly hacked the Houston Astros computers.

How long have you been working on this story?
“In this case it came together very, very quickly. Less than 24 hours.”
This is uncharted water for professional sports. Has this happened?
“It hasn’t. It was a tricky one for us to do. To our knowledge, we couldn’t find any examples.”

Dan Levy at Awful Announcing examines the concept of “vanity” sites.

The sheer notion of a vanity site isn’t new, nor was it created by or for Simmons or Peter King. (This coming from a guy who has a career now because of a show called On the DL Podcast some years back.) It’s just different when an existing media company gives an established talking and/or writing head a big budget and a snazzy subdomain to keep him around or poach him from somewhere else. Is Clay Travis’s Outkick the Coverage a vanity site? I mean anything with that guy is a vanity something, but is it what we’ve come to think of as the Peter King theMMQB.com type of site? There’s far less risk in what Travis is doing than what SI did for King, so contextually speaking, it’s less vain than others.

Danger Guerrero of Uproxx reviews “Ballers,” HBO’s sports version of “Entourage.”

If all of that sounds kind of like Football Entourage to you, there’s a pretty good reason for that:Ballers is Football Entourage. I mean, basically. It’s not a carbon copy or anything. WhereasEntourage focused on a group of childhood friends living it up in Hollywood as they navigated the movie industry with the help of a loudmouth superagent, Ballers focuses on a strong, quiet financial advisor trying to build a post-football career by wrangling current players as clients, many of whom are living it up in Miami with their entourage (lowercase, non-italicized) of childhood friends. But the same themes are there. Parties, yachts, female characters that exist only as sex objects or mothers (or both), etc. It’s like Entourage if Entourage was Playmakers and about Ari instead of Vince. And if Jeremy Piven was The Rock.

Michael McCarthy at SportingNews.com gets insights from Jim Miller about the Jason Whitlock situation.

“Now a lot of people inside are saying, ‘You shouldn’t be surprised, he’s not a manager — and why did you do that in the first place?’,” said Miller. “But look, they obviously wanted to give him a shot. They felt like enough time had gone by where they saw he wasn’t doing it the way they wanted.”

Anna Clark in CJR cites the lack of coverage for women’s sports even during the Women’s World Cup.

APSE does a Q/A with reporters who chronicled American Pharoah’s Triple Crown.

Jeff Pearlman has a Q/A with long-time ESPN anchor Linda Cohn.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has an opening for a Green Bay Packers beat reporter.

 

Why Jordan Spieth’s success presents dilemma to Dallas Morning News

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An excerpt from my latest column for Poynter.

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The Dallas Morning News initially hadn’t planned to staff this week’s U.S. Open in Seattle. However, its golf writer Bill Nichols is on hand because of one reason: Jordan Spieth.

Spieth, the newly-minted Masters champion, presents the Morning News with quite a dilemma. Despite limited resources, the paper is trying to figure out how to cover a local product who is the hottest young star in golf.

“Jordan has been an interesting test case in the new world for us,” said sports editor Garry Leavell.

Leavell says his travel budget is roughly a third of what it was 5 or 6 years ago. As a result, the Morning News stopped covering golf’s majors after the Masters in 2011.

“It’s all about economics,” Leavell said.

The Morning News hardly is alone, as other newspapers have cut back on staffing majors. However, this is a huge departure for a golf-obsessed sports section that once had national golf writers staffing 15-20 tournaments per year. I can recall the Morning News had three seats in the Augusta National press room during my days covering golf for the Chicago Tribune. I was told the Morning News was “grandfathered in” when the club denied our request for a third seat for the Tribune.

The Morning News, though, wasn’t at the Masters in April when the 21-year-old Spieth donned the green jacket with a stunning performance. Leavell says he considered sending a reporter to Augusta during the weekend after Spieth jumped out to an early lead. However, the cost was prohibitive for a full-priced airfare.

Leavell went with Plan B to chronicle Spieth’s historic victory. Nichols wrote a 1-A story based on watching the tournament on TV with members at Spieth’s Dallas club. Kevin Sherrington and Barry Horn contributed columns. Leavell also hired former Washington Post golf writer, Len Shapiro, to file a story from Augusta. Add a picture page, and the Morning News had 17 columns dedicated to Spieth.

Leavell said it was an impressive package, but he knew something was missing.

“For those of us who have been around here a long time, it was painful [for a Morning News reporter or columnist] not to be there,” Leavell said. “It goes against your instincts. The writers were asking questions about it. It’s a very difficult call.”