TOUR Championship 2014 live stream: How to watch online, TV coverage and more

It’s the final tournament of the PGA Tour season, and just 29 golfers remain in the FedEx Cup’s TOUR Championship. That’s the smallest and most exclusive field of the year, and it makes for an extremely flexible schedule and relatively easy golf broadcast.

With only 15 groups in play, the Tour can obviously afford to push tee times way back from their normal start time. They even did this last week when there were 70 players left in the playoffs, opting to group them in threesomes and send them off split tees so the entire field was condensed into a two-hour window on the tee sheet. This ensured that every single player in the field would be out on the course at the same time, and that gives the TV partner ample options to show. Often a cluster of the biggest names finish their rounds well before the TV coverage comes in the afternoon on Thursday and Friday at normal tournaments. It’s just the reality of having a large, ~150-man field in the first couple rounds of tournaments. This happened in the first round at the first two FedEx Cup events -- Rory McIlroy rolled into the playoffs as the game’s must-watch dominant force, but played out his first round in obscurity before the broadcast was live. There will be no such problems this week, and Rory will be out in the penultimate group at 1:50 p.m., so expect to see his every shot.

As I noted in our viewer’s guide this week, the TOUR Championship is the last PGA Tour event of the season on network TV. CBS packed up its golf operations three weeks ago to transition to football, and this will be NBC’s last official PGA Tour broadcast of the year. They will carry the Ryder Cup and provide some light coverage of Tiger Woods’ limited-field party at the World Challenge, but this is it for PGA Tour events. Golf Channel takes over during the Fall Series in October and November. And they’re the ones who will have the sole coverage of the first two rounds before splitting duties with their Comcast sister on the weekend.

Golf Channel will come on the air at 1 p.m. ET, about an hour into the first player’s round. Even with just 29 players in the field, the target is a 6 p.m. finish for all four days at East Lake. If you just have to watch golf before that, PGA Tour will have their featured groups stream up and running an hour earlier. And as usual, there will be an entire simulcast of the TV coverage via Golf Channel’s LiveExtra service. The final pairing, Chris Kirk and Billy Horschel, goes out at 2 p.m. so we may finish a little before 6 p.m., if there’s no weather interruptions. There’s a lot of money on the line, but we’ve seen these Tour pros play sub-4-hour rounds when they get paired up in a limited field on Thursdays and Fridays.

Here’s the media schedule for Thursday’s first round:

1 to 6 p.m. ET -- Golf Channel

8:30 to 1:30 a.m. -- Golf Channel (replay)

1 to 6 p.m. -- Golf Channel simulcast stream

Noon to 6 p.m. -- PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 93/208)