CBS Sports faces a sneaky big challenge this Sunday. The venerable golf broadcaster will cover the final round of the 2026 PGA Championship. And millions of viewers will find out if CBS has its TV A-game back after botching coverage of the Masters Tournament.
Remember, it was only a month ago that CBS badly fumbled its coverage of the final round of Rory McIlroy’s win at Augusta National Golf Club. With McIlroy leading by two shots on the 18th hole and needing only a bogey 5 to claim his first Green Jacket, CBS was cruising to another Sports Emmy nomination. Then everything went completely off the rails.
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The swashbuckling Northern Irishman decided to hit his driver off the 18th tee—practically slicing the ball into South Carolina. Things instantly went south for CBS among the azaleas and towering pines.
Struggling to catch up, the network somehow lost the second shots of both McIlroy and his playing partner, Cam Young. For more than a minute, nobody knew where their balls ended up. Not CBS announcers. Not the CBS production truck. Not the millions of TV viewers left screaming in the dark.
Was McIlroy in OK shape? Or was he facing a double-bogey–opening the door for the worst major tournament choke since Jean van de Velde at the 1999 British Open?
Eventually, a desperate CBS discovered McIlroy’s ball in a front bunker facing the 18th green. The superstar blasted out, lagged his first putt a foot from the hole, then stood over a tap-in. But CBS blew it again, blocking the view of the winning putt dropping with a TV shot of McIlroy’s golf shoes. Once the unseen putt dropped, McIlroy yelled in triumph. But for one agonizing second, we couldn’t tell if McIlroy was screaming due to the thrill of victory—or the agony of defeat.
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Millions of TV viewers were left fuming. Critics like myself ripped CBS for a rare fumble after decades of sterling golf coverage. Neither CBS nor the secretive Augusta National issued a public post-mortem. Golf TV experts speculated it was attributable to everything from simple human error to bad luck from the sports gods.
The closest thing to an explanation came later from CBS’s Jim Nantz, who loyally took one for the team on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show. “We all make mistakes,” Nantz admitted to McAfee. “For the record, the putt was that long. If he would have missed it, we would have the all-time story in the history of golf. But I’m really proud of our crew. You’re making so many split-second decisions.”
The legendary play-by-play announcer has a point. As one golf TV source who declined to be named tells Front Office Sports: “This happens on live television. It just happened at the worst possible time, in the worst possible place, which is why everybody noticed. Believe me, those guys at CBS feel worse about it than anybody. Nantz? Sellers Shy [CBS’s lead golf producer]? They work all year to make it perfect. Then this happened.”
The bottom line: CBS has provided many unforgettable golf moments over the decades. Along with NBC Sports, it’s one of the PGA Tour’s two major TV partners in the U.S. But nobody’s perfect. As Nantz noted to McAfee, the same CBS that was roasted for screwing up the 2026 Masters has been nominated for a Sports Emmy for its Masters coverage in 2025.
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The PGA Championship is not just some tour stop. It’s the second major of the year. This is not the same CBS golf team of yesteryear. Shy is under tremendous pressure after becoming only the third lead golf producer in CBS history, after Frank Chirkinian and Lance Barrow. Strong coverage of Sunday’s final round will go a long way toward indicating whether CBS’s implosion at the Masters was simply an aberration—or a real cause for concern.
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