Shot chart from NBC Sunday Open Championship telecast - 2016

I tracked the strokes televised by NBC during the Sunday round of the Open Championship. I started tracking at 9am ET to provide a decent comparison to the other majors I have tracked. The final putt was at 1:30pm so the tracking covered 4.5 hours.

NBC aired all but one stroke from winner Henrik Stenson (skipping a tap-in on 12th) and all but two from runner-up Phil Mickelson (bypassing tap-ins on #2 and #5). With those two separating themselves from the field, NBC focused heavily on that pairing. In fact, NBC devoted a whopping 56% of all televised strokes during this period to the Stenson/Mickelson duo (who didn't even tee off until 35 minutes into the tracking).

NBC televised only 224 shots during this period which worked out to 0.83 strokes per minute. This was a sizable decrease from the ESPN shot rate of 1.23 that I measured from the 2015 Open Championship and the lowest rate for any major that I have tracked. The lack of competition from the rest of the field clearly contributed to the low rate. NBC chose to aggressively spotlight the drama and excellence of the lead group (and take numerous commercial breaks) rather than fill time with relatively meaningless golf action from the rest of the pack.

For comparison, refer to the shot tracking data I compiled for CBS from the 2016 Masters and Fox from the 2016 US Open, In that Masters post, you can find links to the shot charts I did for the 2014 and 2015 majors.

NBC showed a total of 24 golfers during the tracking period. The highest finisher not shown during this span was Soren Kjeldsen who tied for 9th.

Here is the complete shot chart:

Player	Shots shown	Finish	Pairing
Phil Mickelson	63 (of 65)	2	1
Henrik Stenson	62 (of 63)	1	1
Rory McIlroy	14	T5	11
Andrew Johnston	13	8	2
JB Holmes	10	3	3
Bill Haas	8	T9	2
Sergio Garcia	7	T5	5
Dustin Johnson	5	T9	8
Steve Stricker	4	4	3
Tyrrell Hatton	4	T5	7
Jason Day	4	T22	15
Lee Westwood	4	T22	22
Darren Clarke	4	T30	20
Zach Johnson	3	T12	9
Emiliano Grillo	3	T12	11
Haydn Porteous	3	T30	13
Tony Finau	2	T18	4
Kevin Na	2	T22	8
Thomas Pieters	2	T30	14
Jordan Spieth	2	T30	26
Jim Furyk	2	T59	26
Thongchai Jaidee	1	T22	14
Rafa Cabrera Bella	1	T39	16
Rickie Fowler	1	T46	24
Soren Kjeldsen	0	T9	4
others	0
total	224

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