Saturday Farmers Insurance Open Finish Highlights Benefits of Creative Scheduling

This week’s Farmers Insurance Open will begin on Wednesday and finish on Saturday, getting out of the way so the tournament admittedly doesn’t have to compete against goliaths known as the NFL conference championship games. For every diehard golf fan who questions this decision with a “Why?” there are big-picture observers who ask, “Why isn’t there more of this?”

Before we can answer that, let’s take a little stroll down Memory Lane.

The year was 2006. The PGA Tour’s season-finale was scheduled to finish on Nov. 5, smack in the middle of Week 9 of the NFL schedule, while golf’s two biggest drawing cards, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, opted to stay home and ostensibly watch football instead.

A fix was on the way, though. The next season concluded with the first-ever FedEx Cup playoffs, finally giving the schedule some finality while gathering the best players for the closing stretch. To this day, there are specific criticisms of this format, but it’s impossible to insist that it wasn’t an upgrade from a late-autumn finish that was abandoned by the game’s biggest stars.

Part of the rationale, it was announced at the time, was to avoid the competition of football season – and yet, the final two playoff events literally still clashed with the first two weeks of the NFL calendar.

“It’s going to create a lot of interest,” then-commissioner Tim Finchem said of the FedEx Cup, “and we feel comfortable that we can carry our audience a couple weeks into the football season to make this season finale in Atlanta very special indeed.”

It took more than a decade for PGA Tour brass to realize that even playoff events weren’t enough to woo cross-sport fans from the beginning of football season. Six years ago, the schedule was altered to conclude at the end of August.

That might have seemed like a no-brainer policy change, but it set an important precedent. For years, the PGA Tour acknowledged that it was a small fish in the NFL’s large pond but still kept trying to take the bait. This shift avoided any scheduling conflict and offered golf a greater platform on the general sporting landscape.

All of which brings us back to this week’s event.

After years of the Farmers coinciding with the NFL’s dark week between the conference championship games and Super Bowl, offering that bigger platform it obviously preferred, revamped scheduling placed the final round at Torrey Pines right up against the AFC and NFC finales. In 2022, the idea of a Wednesday start/Saturday finish was implemented, once again giving the event a much-deserved spotlight.

The lingering question remains, though: If the Farmers Insurance Open and FedEx Cup playoffs can be moved to avoid clashing with the NFL, then why haven’t there been similar outside-the-box scheduling initiatives?

Last week’s NFL playoff games drew massive ratings, while an admittedly sleepy conclusion to The American Express surely didn’t pry away many viewers. In two weeks, the WM Phoenix Open will lead directly into the Super Bowl – and if there’s a playoff, as there’s been in six of the past nine years, it will largely serve as a tree-falls-in-the-forest conundrum.

Over the first two weeks of its season, the Korn Ferry Tour started tournaments on a Sunday and finished on a Wednesday. Maybe a middle-of-the-week completion isn’t completely enviable, but it does give those events a better chance of avoiding competition for fan support.

If the first few weeks of TGL — and strong early ratings on ESPN — have shown us anything, it’s that some form of golf can work outside the traditional day/time constraints.

None of which is to suggest that the PGA Tour should roll over and play dead anytime there’s a breath of football in the same viewing window, but with precedents already set to avoid such confrontations, perhaps a little more creative consideration toward golf’s schedule could help matters moving forward.

Now, in the fourth year of that shift at Torrey Pines, it’s been proven that a little of this creativity can indeed go a long way.