Two months ago, I shuffled down a desert path, looped around a gaggle of red rocks, and observed something strange: I was standing on a golf course.
I could see it in the craggly, eye-popping formations of stone above; in the land, which gently bent and buckled in the divine swales of a dogleg; and yes, even in the earth, where a soft, powdery taupe sand filled the path ahead of me and the footbeds of my hiking shoes beneath me.
I was having a moment familiar to any golfer over a certain age and beneath a certain threshold of sanity: I was daydreaming a golf course into existence.
It wasn’t until several weeks later that I realized my moment from the middle of the Devil’s Garden trail at Arches National Park was not mine alone. I was scrolling social media one morning when I saw a photo of something eerily familiar to my daydream: a golf hole built into the same landscape and navigating the same striations I’d envisioned. The architect was Agustin Piza, and the hole? Well, it was built in Dreamland, too, as a part of the collection of holes utilized for Season 2 of the TGL.
If you were to mount a defense of what the TGL has proven through the early days of Season 2, this is probably what you’d argue: It has proven how fun golf can be when golf isn’t restricted to the laws of nature (or the property limits of national parkland). It has proven that golf can be open to imagination.
But does the golf fandom agree? This is the most important question facing the TGL in its second go-round (and beyond). And it’s the question that sent me combing through a few key datapoints from Season 2, which we review below.
The biggest test facing the TGL in year 2 was also the first. How would the league perform in its opening broadcast of Season 2? And how would it fare on a Sunday afternoon against the coordinated machine of the NFL?
The answer was … not bad! The TGL season opener averaged 646,000 viewers in a national timeslot on ABC, down considerably from its season opener in 2025 (which drew 919,000 average viewers on a Tuesday night on ESPN), but still well above the threshold set by similar golf events on network television against the NFL. By comparison, the TGL’s Season 2 opener drew larger audiences than the PNC Championship (560,000) and Grant Thornton Invitational (450,000) in similar timeslots.
The context is extra relevant here: The TGL’s ratings enjoyed a relatively strong start to 2025 on ESPN, but faltered as the season progressed, with ratings steadily decreasing throughout the year. With only one network timeslot, it was critical for the league to show momentum in its opening week of year 2. The opening week numbers weren’t smash-hit status, but they weren’t enough to raise any pointed questions, either.
I promise this whole story won’t be about the ratings, but they have had an interesting story to tell over the opening weeks of Season 2.
TGL’s second match, which featured the first-ever win for Rory McIlroy’s Boston Common, drew just 354,000 average viewers — this time on ESPN2.
While those numbers represent a near-50-percent dip from the season-opener (and include arguably the league’s biggest active star in McIlroy), they also weren’t a complete shock to those paying attention to the data. As SBJ‘s Josh Carpenter pointed out, TGL averaged just a hair above 300,000 average viewers in seven matches on ESPN2 in Season 1. The week 2 ratings represent a modest bump from that number, but nothing particularly noteworthy.
The takeaway? Broadcast location is critical for the TGL. The better the network and schedule billing, the better the ratings. And when the network and schedule are worse? Well, that’s how the ratings fare, too. Of course, most sports leagues would argue they’re merely a broadcast network or primetime billing away from relevance, but TGL seems more sensitive than most leagues to schedule and broadcast location. For example, the opening matchup of Season 2 rates as significantly larger than LIV’s largest audience on broadcast TV (484,000 on FOX), but the ESPN2 ratings show that audience won’t travel to other networks, timeslots and days of the week.
Some of this could be due to TGL’s relative youth: Fans enjoy watching the league when they can find it conveniently, but they haven’t developed the emotional connection to the league to prove “sticky” across many networks. TGL’s ever-changing schedule, networks and timeslots only complicate matters when it comes to building a consistent and reliable audience.
With virtually no golf on the calendar (thanks to the Sentry’s cancellation), TGL has had the advantage of being the lone show in town as the calendar has flipped into the new year. Perhaps the biggest beneficiary of that limelight has been, interestingly, the LPGA, which announced plans to create a Women’s TGL in 2027 earlier this week.
The upside of the WTGL is fairly obvious to those who have spent even a few minutes listening to new LPGA commissioner Craig Kessler. Under Kessler, the LPGA is actively seeking ways to operate in the “attention economy” — and an additive, made-for-TV golf league with the upside of showcasing player personalities fits Kessler’s vision to a T.
The news also presents an interesting upside for the TGL: If the league can show it is capable of applying the same first principles to other golf leagues and generating ratings and commercial success, it is not hard to see how it might apply to other sports, or apply more deeply to the golf world. (The opportunity for a mixed-gender league seems too obvious to miss.)
While there is room to disagree over golf’s need for another league, there’s little doubt that more golf is good for everyone, particularly when it is being watched by broader and younger and more diverse audiences.
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