Weekly Ratings Pain: PGA Championship Edition

I've been doing these segments while we have been under TIGERLESS WATCH 2008, so I thought I would develop an extremely crude graphic for it.

It was not pretty for the PGA Championship. In fact, this is probably the worst yet.

Despite Padraig Harrington's thrilling victory on Sunday at Oakland Hills, the overnight rating for the PGA Championship was 3.0, down 55% from last year's final round at Southern Hills — an event won by (surely you recall) Woods.

Ouch! Let's put this into some perspective.

The three domestic events were down precipitously , with the AT&T Classic off 42% and the WGC-Brigestone lower by 39%. The British Open, on ABC, was down a more modest 11% from '07.

Dick Friedman at SI talks more about what this could mean for the Playoff events.

Such a figure bodes poorly for NBC's return to the Tour over Labor Day weekend for the second FedEx Cup playoff event, the Deutsche Bank Championship at TPC Boston in Norton, Mass. (CBS will telecast the first FedEx event, the Barclays Championship, which Woods did not play in last year.) The Deutsche Bank — which last year featured Woods's gripping Labor Day duel with eventual winner, Phil Mickelson — will be hard-pressed to approach '07's superb 3.4 final-round rating. Nor can NBC be optimistic about the other two FedEx events it carries, the BMW and the Tour Championship. With the possible exception of the Sept. 19-21 Ryder Cup (also on NBC), the Nielsens almost certainly will stay in the doldrums until Tiger's expected return in 2009.