With Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy playing, TGL posts bounceback ratings

Turns out that having Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy on your broadcast does good things for TV ratings. Who knew?

TGL's fourth week featured a series of firsts for the new tech-infused indoor golf league: both Woods and McIlroy head-to-head in a competitive match. Woods' Jupiter Links Golf Club defeated McIlroy's Boston Common Golf Club in overtime, a match that was in doubt right on through and over its allotted two-hour run time.

The match averaged 864,000 viewers on ESPN, up from Week 3's 682,000 viewers but down from the league's debut (919,000 viewers) and second week (1 million). Week 2 featured Woods' initial appearance in TGL, while Week 3 featured Justin Thomas and Atlanta Drive GC against Rickie Fowler and New York GC.

Per Sports Business Journal's Austin Karp, the match's numbers hit their height in the 8:30-8:45 period at 1.1 million. However, that was also the time that a Duke basketball game was scheduled to begin on ESPN; the game was moved to ESPNU while TGL finished up.

Through four weeks TGL is tracking at 33% better than college basketball did in the similar broadcast window in 2024. Depending on whether you're a glass-half-full or half-empty type, this is either a sign that TGL is holding onto an audience, or a sign that even the combined star power of Woods and McIlroy isn't enough to prevent a slide from the league's early high numbers.

TGL has seven regular-season nights still on its schedule, and every one of those dates will feature either Woods, McIlroy or both. (Some dates have multiple matches scheduled — Feb. 17, for instance, has all six teams in action.) Four dates' worth of playoffs follow, right up until March 25, and TGL will be hoping that Woods and McIlroy will be in position for all of them ... or that new, equally compelling storylines will surface over the course of the year.