Sunday, June 19, 2016

Shot chart from Fox Sunday US Open telecast - 2016

I tracked the shots televised by Fox during the 4th round of the US Open. With the final pairing getting underway at 3:30 pm ET, I began the monitoring at 3:00 to provide a fair comparison to the other tournaments where I have performed similar Sunday tracking.

Fox showed 354 unique strokes during the tracking period. The final putt dropped at 8:16 so this worked out to 1.12 strokes per minute. This shot rate significantly trailed the 1.33 of the 2016 Masters on CBS. This was also a decrease from the 1.18 shown by Fox during its 2015 coverage of the US Open. Fox spent quite a bit of time discussing the controversy over the potential one-stroke penalty which was eventually applied to Johnson's score after the round, so that might explain part of the dropoff. (Note: From the 2016 Masters post, you can find links to the shot charts I compiled from the 2014 and 2015 majors).

Fox showed all but four of the strokes played by winner Dustin Johnson and all but four from third-round leader Shane Lowry. Fox showed just 20 golfers playing strokes. Nine players were covered for at least 15 shots. The highest finisher not shown during the tracking period was David Lingmerth who finished 12th.

Also notable: Fox went commercial-free for 52 minutes starting at 7:25.

Here is the complete shot chart:

PlayerShots shownFinishPairing
Shane Lowry72 (of 76)T21
Dustin Johnson64 (of 68*)12
Scott Piercy40T24
Jason Day29T85
Sergio Garcia25T54
Andrew Landry24T151
Branden Grace23T53
Lee Westwood21T322
Jim Furyk15T213
Daniel Summerhays8T83
Bryson DeChambeau8T155
Brooks Koepka6T1319
Jason Dufner5T87
Jordan Spieth5T3715
Kevin Na377
Zach Johnson2T86
Kevin Streelman1T136
Yusaku Miyazato1T2312
Jon Rahm1T2323
Angel Cabrera1T3728
David Lingmerth01220
others0
total354

* Johnson took 68 "shots" plus one penalty stroke for a score of 69

Note: The Pairing column reflects the tee time groupings in reverse order, so 1 =  final pairing, 2 = next-to-last, etc.