Failure’s not too hard to spot. Success? That’s a little harder to pin down.
In sports, catastrophic failure has its own specific gravity, so much so that we can evoke some of the most skull-clutching examples with just a few words. No más. Wide right. Buckner. Failure burns deep; it remembers itself.
Success can be a bit more slippery, if only because it’s not as easy to define. Greg Norman at the 1996 Masters is why Dr. Heimlich invented his maneuver, no argument there. But what about things that are objectively terrible that still bear most of the principal markers of success? With a total estimated value of $10.3 billion, the Dallas Cowboys are the most valuable sports franchise on the surface of the planet, but at the same time, they … kind of stink. (“Filthy rich” is shorthand for staring down the barrel of a 30-year Super Bowl drought when your net worth exceeds the GDP of Madagascar.)
The binary’s no easier to sort out on a smaller scale. The billionaire-backed TGL Golf venture is about to wrap its first season in the absence of its two biggest stars—the teams led by co-founders Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy missed the cut for the playoffs—but still put up some worthy ratings numbers on ESPN. The Unrivaled 3-on-3 women’s basketball league, meanwhile, is hurtling toward the conclusion of its own inaugural campaign, and if the TV deliveries haven’t been staggering, the social impressions suggest that Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart’s startup has attracted a dedicated and enthusiastic audience.
At the same time, the Season 1 numbers for the new leagues aren’t sustainable in the long run. Both TGL and Unrivaled will need to show significant ratings improvement in their respective second terms—both of which are guaranteed. “Grow or die” is the founding imperative of any startup, and televised sports leagues are no exception.
So where does TGL stand as it heads into its first playoff rounds? Through its first 15 telecasts, the virtual-golf league is averaging 502,400 viewers per outing, a figure that has exceeded ESPN’s pre-launch expectations. The individual rounds have been a mixed bag, maxing out at just over 1 million viewers for Woods’ first appearance in Week 2, while scraping bottom on Monday afternoon with a match that averaged just 160,000 viewers care of ESPN2.
While a 3 p.m. ET workday window obviously isn’t an ideal environment from a ratings perspective, TGL’s schedule has been nothing if not unorthodox. More to the point, that largely overlooked telecast still managed to outperform the network’s year-ago window, which is one of television’s more obscure yardsticks of success.
Naturally, TGL’s ratings were at their best whenever Woods was swinging a club. Golf’s biggest draw followed up his two-comma debut with a Week 4 match against McIlroy’s crew that averaged 864,000 viewers, and while his two subsequent appearances held less sway (546,000 viewers in Week 6 and 500,000 on Tuesday night), the deliveries far outstripped ESPN’s usual bill of fare.
Raw deliveries aside, TGL nailed the whole proof-of-concept thing by attracting a far younger audience than golf is used to reaching. The median age of the TGL audience is 51.4 years, which is considerably less gray than the crowds the PGA and LIV attract (about 63 for both leagues). Notoriously indifferent to anyone on the wrong side of the 25-54 demo, advertisers eat this stuff up with a spork.
Speaking of LIV, the Saudi-backed upstart still can’t seem to summon up a TV audience that is consistent with its disruptive inclinations. The final round of Fox Sports’ first LIV event in Riyadh averaged 40,200 viewers across the cable channels FS1 and FS2, which was in keeping with the league’s historic ratings woes. Jon Rahm’s victory in LIV’s Individual Championship averaged all of 89,000 viewers on The CW broadcast network last September; by way of comparison, something called The Joe Schmo Show scared up 230,000 viewers on TBS Tuesday night directly opposite President Donald Trump’s address to Congress (36.6 million).
Again, the absence of Woods and McIlroy undoubtedly will put a damper on TGL’s playoffs (March 17-18) and subsequent championship series the following week, but even with those two top draws on ice, the first season looks like a win for everyone involved. Onward and upward.
Unrivaled’s TV deliveries aren’t in the same league as TGL’s, but the 3-on-3 league is also playing off a different tee. While Tiger Woods has been responsible for hundreds of millions of Sunday afternoon broadcast impressions since he smashed golf’s ratings record with his 1997 victory in Augusta, women’s hoops only began serving up blockbuster TV numbers quite recently. In fact, the only basketball game to crack the top 100 broadcasts of 2024 was the Iowa-South Carolina title showdown on ABC, which averaged 18.9 million viewers. That didn’t just beat out the men’s March Madness final, but every NBA game as well—going back to 2019.
While not nearly as gaudy, last fall’s WNBA Finals also set a record. The Liberty-Lynx series peaked at 2.15 million viewers for the deciding Game 5, which New York won in overtime, while the full set averaged 1.57 million. Total postseason deliveries in Caitlin Clark’s rookie season were up 138% year-over-year.
Unrivaled may not have succeeded in rostering Clark for its inaugural campaign, but it doesn’t take an advanced degree in math to understand that enlisting the Fever phenom to suit up next year would send the 3×3 league’s TV numbers into the stratosphere. While Unrivaled put up its biggest deliveries to date (377,000 viewers) on Valentine’s Day with its 1-on-1 tourney, only one game since then has broken the 200,000 mark. At the risk of flogging whatever’s left of Secretariat, Clark is the WNBA’s horse whisperer. Setting aside her on-court exploits—in her first year in the bigs, she set the league’s single-season assist record and snapped the previous rookie marks for scoring and 3-pointers—Clark in 2024 also appeared in 20 of the 23 WNBA games that drew 1 million viewers or more. Before Clark went pro, the last time a WNBA game delivered 1 million viewers was in 2008.
For all that, Unrivaled has assembled a crew of fanatics, if the league’s social media presence is anything to go by. The league’s TikTok impressions number in the tens of millions and its dedicated subreddit is already among the site’s top 9% as ranked by size. If the Nielsen data doesn’t necessarily tell the full story, the intensity of digital engagement around Unrivaled suggests that fans are very much taken with the new venture.
Unrivaled will have ample time to expand on its first full season of TV deliveries, as the league’s $100 million deal with Warner Bros. Discovery ensures it will return in 2026 and 2027. Per terms of the contract, the first three years are guaranteed, while a three-year option may be triggered at WBD’s discretion. And since the league is owned by its players, everyone involved has a vested interest in its success.
Also reassuring is Unrivaled’s sponsorship roster, a group of 11 league-wide backers that includes founding partner Ally Financial, Samsung, State Farm, Miller Lite and Sephora. These sponsors help pay the salaries—and performance bonuses—of players who might otherwise opt to compete overseas as a means of earning a supplementary income. Thus, if Unrivaled succeeds, it will have a significant impact on the culture of the WNBA and women’s sports in general.
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