Sunday, September 20, 2020

Shot chart from NBC Sunday US Open telecast - 2020

Once again, I tracked the shots that NBC televised during the Sunday round of the US Open. The final pairing teed off at 1:30pm ET, so I started tracking at 1:00 to provide a reasonable comparison to the other majors I have monitored.

I counted 327 shots during the tracking period. This total includes 30 shots that NBC aired on its Playing Through split screen feature during seven of the commercial breaks. The final putt was holed at 5:59 resulting in a rate of only 1.09 strokes per minute. This was one of the lowest rates since I have been doing this tracking. It was down from the 1.17 shown by Fox during the 2019 US Open and way down from the 1.69 by CBS from the 2020 PGA Championship

NBC showed 65 strokes from winner Bryson DeChambeau skipping only tap-ins on the 2nd and 3rd holes. NBC aired 73 from runner-up Matthew Wolff covering all but tap-ins on holes 8 and 13. The top five finishers (all shown 30+ times) received 75% of the televised shots. NBC showed 19 golfers playing strokes during this period with nine players getting coverage for at least 11 shots. The highest finisher not shown during the period was Tony Finau who tied for 8th.

For much of the round, DeChambeau and Wolff were the only ones in serious contention so NBC spent a lot of time showing them preparing for shots and engaging in some caddy-player strategy discussions. Since they were paired together, NBC frequently stayed on the twosome to show both players live rather than being able to bounce around when the top contenders are in different groupings. 

NBC went commercial-free for the final 66 minutes of play, but seemed to show a huge volume of commercials during the rest of the monitoring period.

I also tracked the number of televised strokes by hole during the tracking period. The 1st hole was featured most often (35 strokes) with the 18th shown second most at 30. Hole 3 received the fewest televised shots (12).

This is the seventh year that I have compiled these televised shot charts. For comparison to prior majors, see this summary table which contains links to all shot charts since 2014.

Here is the complete shot chart (including the highest finisher not shown during the tracking period) followed by the hole-by-hole breakdown:

PlayerShots shownFinishPairing
  
Matthew Wolff73 (of 75)21
Bryson DeChambeau65 (of 67)11
Louis Oosthuizen4532
Xander Schauffele3353
Harris English3043
Rory McIlroy23T84
Justin Thomas13T810
Zach Johnson12T84
Hideki Matsuyama11T172
Dustin Johnson6T611
Webb Simpson4T87
Viktor Hovland2T135
Patrick Reed2T138
Joaquin Niemann2T237
Jon Rahm2T2317
Adam Long1T139
Will Zalatoris1T69
Bubba Watson1T3113
Daniel Berger1T3416
Tony Finau0T812
others0 
    
total327 

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

Hole numberTelevised shots
135
217
312
419
517
616
716
817
919
1019
1115
1221
1313
1414
1514
1617
1716
1830