How to watch the WGC Cadillac Championship live online, TV schedule, radio and more

For the first time since the 2012 PGA Championship, all top 50 players in the Official World Golf Rankings will tee it up in the same tournament. The World Golf Championships events are typically loaded with an international group that doesn’t exist anywhere else at your normal weekly PGA Tour stop. But to get all 50 at Doral this week for the WGC-Cadillac Championship is taking that depth to a new level.

This Cadillac Championship is the first of four of WGCs in 2015. There’s this stop at Doral, the WGC-Match Play event which is now in May and in San Francisco, the WGC-Bridgestone in Akron, and the HSBC Champions overseas in Shanghai. The event in China is during the fall series and actually counts towards this season. So technically this is the first WGC of the year, but Bubba Watson has already won the first WGC of the Tour’s wraparound season that includes those six fall events from 2014 (confused?).

The entire WGC setup is a bit controversial. The events are no-cut tournaments, so you’re guaranteed cash and given the high world ranking of your competitors, a nice haul of world-ranking points. This can make the top of the rankings and these tournaments fairly sealed off and frustrating. The opposing-week tournament in Puerto Rico does not even award the full 500 FedExCup points. It has the normal full PGA Tour event field, but less perks and rewards. The Cadillac Championship has just 71 players and an enormous $9.25 million purse. You could mail it in for four days, come in last, and still make more than $40k. If you can get there, the WGC circuit is about as good as it gets out on the PGA Tour.

The Florida swing might not have the caliber of venues that the West Coast swing boasts, but the fields are obviously loaded. This stop at Doral, last week’s Honda Classic, and the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill are three of the top tournaments on the schedule that always attract the top players. And they come in a four-week span all in the same state. The WGC, however, weeds out the riffraff and gets the best from Europe and Asia to fly around the world and into Miami.

With such a loaded but small field, Golf Channel, NBC, and PGATour.com will have comprehensive coverage from Doral for the next four days. Golf Channel typically does a three-hour broadcast for the first two rounds of a normal PGA Tour event, but they will go for five fours on both Thursday and Friday. And given that field size, everyone will play at least a part of their round during the coverage window -- a luxury that’s not available with the normal fields of ~150 players.

As usual, NBC has taken over for CBS on the Florida swing while Nantz and company focus on college basketball matters until the Masters. That’s usually a benefit to the golf viewer, because both NBC and Golf Channel are owned by Comcast, so there’s a good deal of cooperation to boost coverage on the weekends. That annoying half-hour blackout period we get to switch out graphics and talent when Golf Channel throws it to CBS doesn’t exist. Instead, the early-round coverage on GC runs seamlessly over to NBC, where Johnny Miller and Dan Hicks await. A half-hour doesn’t seem like much but it always seems to inevitably fall when the leaders start their rounds, there’s a lead change, or some other big early-round development.

The Florida swing has also become the traditional start of the “Spotlight Coverage” broadcast season. While NBC runs the later coverage on Saturday and Sunday, sister network Golf Channel has a concurrent broadcast going that focuses on three or four holes with a separate announce crew. The big benefit is that the screen is covered in graphics with ShotLink data, season stats, weekly stats, individual hole stats, TrackMan numbers, and any other analytics that are becoming such a big part of the game.

This week, that broadcast will highlight the final four finishing holes at the Gil Hanse-redesigned and Donald Trump-backed Doral. The 18th at Doral is generally considered its best hole, so watching shots into that green all weekend is a pretty good alternative to the traditional broadcast over on NBC.

There are obviously a lot of TV offerings this week, but what about online? Well, thankfully the PGA Tour is generally pretty good about streaming everything you might want to watch. All the TV broadcasts will be simulcast online throughout the week via Golf Channel and NBC’s LiveExtra service. Aside from that, PGATour.com will have a featured holes stream up and running and showing all the groups at that par-5 leadoff hole from the very start of the tournament on Thursday.

Another potentially cool and different way to watch early in the week comes from PGA Tour’s new SkratchTV network. They will have a camera set up on the range for two hours on Thursday and it will essentially be controlled by the fans via Twitter and Facebook. You can tag a tweet with #SkratchCam or comment on their Facebook page to request who you’d prefer to see striping balls down the range at Doral.

With Rory, Adam Scott, Phil Mickelson, and all the other pretty-to-funky swings, this might be fun way to watch the players warm up earlier in the day while you’re stuck depressed in a cubicle. That begins at 10 a.m. ET on Thursday.

Here are all your media options for the week:

1 to 6 p.m. -- Golf Channel

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

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

Noon to 3 p.m. -- Golf Channel

3 to 6 p.m. -- NBC

3 to 5 p.m. -- Golf Channel “Spotlight Coverage” of Doral finishing holes 15 through 18

1 to 6 p.m. -- Golf Channel/NBC Sports LiveExtra simulcast stream

1 to 3 p.m. -- Golf Channel

3 to 7 p.m. -- NBC

3 to 6 p.m. -- Golf Channel “Spotlight Coverage” of Doral finishing holes 15 through 18

1 to 7 p.m. -- Golf Channel/NBC Sports LiveExtra simulcast stream