In the aftermath of Rory McIlroy’s Masters victory, Kevin Kisner made a guest appearance on Barstool Sports’ Fore Play podcast to break down the week that was.
The nearly two-hour conversation covered a lot of bases: Rory’s triumph, Scottie Scheffler and Justin Rose’s near-miss, and other big moments. But when the discussion turned to the broadcast, Kisner went on a viral, profanity-laden rant about what he believed to be CBS’ shortcomings.
“I have a very biased opinion so I want to go ahead and put that out there before I start since I work for the other network,” Kisner began. “And I was so f—ing confused the entire time by trying to keep up with the behind-the-scenes CBS feed. They’re literally showing s— that I knew happened ten minutes ago all day long. It was so bad that I in fact texted Colt Knost during the show and said, ‘Do you all ever show a live shot?’ I’m better off following the f—ing app than following your feed.’”
“So your entire Masters coverage is a fantasy world. It’s bulls–t,” Kisner continued. “Whatever we all watch has already happened seven minutes ago. Could you imagine watching the f—ing Super Bowl and being like, ‘Oh yeah, Tom Brady threw that touchdown seven minutes ago, we’re going to act like it’s live here so our announcers can sound really smart and we’re going to sit here and he’s going to throw it wide open down the middle but it actually happened seven minutes ago and everyone in the stadium’s taking a p—. What are we doing, man?”
Kisner, who became a lead golf analyst for NBC in 2024, was onsite at Augusta National working as a lead analyst for Sirius XM’s Masters broadcast team. Beyond serving as an incendiary bit of post-Masters commentary, his comments were extraordinarily unusual for a man serving as an employee of one of the PGA Tour broadcast partners, who rarely, if ever, air public criticisms of one another.
“You have no commercials,” Kisner said. “Play live shots. I don’t know. Our production team at NBC prides themselves on playing every shot that they possibly can live. And we talk about with Dan Hicks, when we can’t, we have to say a moment ago, because we’re trying to make the whole movie make sense, right? We don’t want to show you a tap-in on 16 and go ‘Oh yeah, he’s already hitting his shot on 17’ because obviously he has to walk over there. I have no idea what they’re doing. Literally no idea. They’re showing every shot on tape. It’s incredible. I don’t even know how the announcers call it.”
On Thursday, Kisner returned to the Fore Play podcast to issue an apology.
“It’s been an interesting few days, but it is what it is,” Kisner said. “I just have to apologize to the the golf team at CBS. I crossed the line probably, too much by talking about that whole content. And I know from my short time in the business how wild production is, right? It is a very difficult thing to produce a live show and make it all work and everybody does their best.
“NBC screws up all the time, and we’re just trying to do our best, and I went too far on being critical on them, and I just want all the people associated with it to know I apologize,” he continued. “They’re our partners with the PGA Tour and they continue to showcase in a great way the game we all love, and they’re all trying to do their best, and I was too critical of them.”
You can watch Kisner’s apology in the video above, or the Fore Play podcast episode in its entirety here.
