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

The NFL season may be back Thursday night, but the real highlight of the sports day is the first round of the BMW Championship. The Comcast/NBC family of networks will carry both the NFL opener and the opening round from Cherry Hills, which will provide a nice lead-in to Seahawks-Packers (right?).

With the PGA Tour heading west to Denver for the third leg of the postseason, the coverage for the first two rounds is pushed back a couple hours and will run right up against primetime. Golf Channel is set to come on the air at 4 p.m. ET and carry coverage until 8 p.m. The BMW Championship, which took the place of the old and once-presitigious Western Open, is usually played in the Chicago area, either at Cog Hill or more recently Conway Farms. It occasionally strays away from Chicago, but has always stayed in the Midwest. This move to Denver results in a quick turnaround and cross-country flight after the Monday finish in Boston, but also permits the much later start times for the first two days.

The time change allows for this later broadcast, but also the field size makes coverage and the tee sheet much more manageable. There are only 70 players left in the postseason, with 25 going home after the Barclays and then another 30 bounced in Boston. That’s the absolute minimum size the field can be on a weekend after the cut at a normal PGA Tour event. But the Tour is still sending the players off split tees in groups of three.

So instead of rolling tee times for most of the day, the entire field will be on the course at the same time, condensed in about a two-hour block of tee times. That gives Golf Channel a ton of flexibility to pick and choose who they show, as opposed to having No. 1 in the world Rory McIlroy done with his first round well before TV went live at the last two FedEx Cup events. The first tee time is not until 1:20 p.m. ET, and the last group is off at 3:21 p.m. McIlroy is out in the earlier side of the draw, teeing it up at 1:53 p.m. That means that he should have his entire back nine fall during the GC broadcast window.

While the TV coverage won’t start until 4 p.m., you will be able to watch early in the afternoon via PGATour.com’s featured groups stream. The Jordan Spieth-Jason Day-Jim Furyk trio at 1:42 p.m. is scheduled to be the early group on that stream. And once the TV broadcast goes live, Golf Channel will have their usual simulcast stream up and running on their LiveExtra service. So if you want an appetizer to the NFL kickoff game, here’s your media schedule for the opening round from Cherry Hills:

4 to 8 p.m. ET -- Golf Channel

8:30 to 12:30 a.m. -- Golf Channel (replay)

2 to 8 p.m. -- PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 93/208)