Rainy weather means a disjointed schedule for players AND broadcasters.
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AUGUSTA, Ga. — Sometimes when it rains, it pours. And sometimes, as with Saturday’s CBS broadcast from the Masters, it just stinks.
After a year of preparation, months of promotional advertising and a week of excitement, CBS’s Saturday Masters broadcast lasted just 15 minutes.
There were two culprits. The first was the rain, which fell in large, unrelenting globs at Augusta National and eventually drowned the golf course, rendering even the club’s prodigious SubAir system helpless against the water. Cameras captured water pooling on the putting surfaces and in the fairways, even as maintenance crews were dispatched onto the course between every group to aid against such efforts. Not even the green jackets could argue the dreariness of Saturday’s weather. The majority of them retreated to the clubhouse as the heavens opened in the afternoon, sending the scent of a large, wood-burning fire wafting over the golf course.
The second culprit was timing. The Masters managed to record a full morning’s worth of play on Saturday, but by the time CBS came on the air at 3 p.m. local, the situation had turned considerably worse. The rain fell at its worst in the 20 minutes preceding the network’s broadcast window, and by the time the broadcast started, it was clear the tournament could not go on for much longer. Puddle began to pool up on greens.
Tournament officials suspended play before CBS even had time to reach its second commercial break, officially halting the tournament for the remainder of Saturday at 3:15 p.m. ET, 15 minutes after the network first went on air.
At the time, it was an unlucky break for CBS, whose broadcast window is dictated by the Masters. Though the network surely would have preferred to snag a few extra hours of Saturday Masters TV ratings by going on the air early, its schedule remains at the whims of Augusta National leadership. With ESPN owed airtime on Saturday morning following a separate rain delay on Friday afternoon, the logistics likely grew too confusing to solve.
Still, that decision left several hours on Saturday in which the Masters was being played, with leaders on the course, without TV coverage to support it. The tournament was still accessible to fans through the Masters website and apps, but some fans still weren’t happy about it.
The good news came soon after, though, when the Masters announced CBS would broadcast live coverage of the conclusion of the third-round beginning on Sunday at 8:30 a.m. Under the updated broadcast schedule, CBS scooped up an extra three hours of Masters Sunday coverage, with the conclusion of the third round expected around noon ET. In addition to the network’s previously scheduled five-hour coverage window on Sunday, CBS will now cover close to nine hours of Masters coverage on Sunday at Augusta National, just 15 minutes of airtime fewer than the network was allotted at the beginning of the week.
The decision comes as highly welcome (if unsurprising) news over at CBS, which has scooped extended weekend broadcast windows in past Masters that have been affected by the weather. A similar situation arose most recently in 2019, when storms led to a similar marathon finish on Sunday. CBS broadcast the majority of the day from Augusta National on that Sunday, scoring record ratings along the way as Tiger Woods scooped his 15th major championship title.
So far, the Masters has proven a slight ratings disappointment, with numbers dipping slightly from last year’s Tiger Woods return. CBS hopes to right the ship with the mega-cast, which will dominate most waking hours of Masters Sunday. Here’s hoping the rain follows suit.
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