Players Championship 2015: Time and TV schedule for Sunday’s round

With the USGA bolting to FOX and taking the U.S. Open with them, The Players Championship is now the marquee tournament on NBC. The network always covered it as a major championship, expanding the normal broadcast window, assigning its best talent, and using all their special bells and whistles, especially at the island 17th hole. But after that controversial bidding war over the U.S. Open, NBC was left with the Players and Ryder Cup as their two biggest golf properties. It’s not a Ryder Cup year, so they’re desperately hoping for some drama late on Sunday at TPC Sawgrass.

Even though this is NBC’s biggest golf event of the year, oddly, there’s actually less golf televised than last year. The weekend rounds of PGA Tour events almost always feature early coverage on Golf Channel followed by late afternoon conclusions on the networks, either CBS or NBC. But this week, there’s no third or fourth round broadcast on Golf Channel, which is running their “Live From” pregame show up until the 2 p.m. NBC broadcast. It’s an odd cutdown in the coverage for such a big event, and with Tiger Woods playing early in the day both weekend rounds, that normal early broadcast would have been useful and rated comparably well.

Tiger tees off at 8:55 a.m. with Dustin Johnson. The early tee times are full of major champions who are playing for nothing, and Tiger is obviously the biggest fish. He’ll finish well before NBC goes live, but you can still watch every shot of his round on a PGATour.com featured groups stream. Given the way Tiger has played this week, especially on Saturday morning, it may be for the best that he’s playing his round out of view of the TV broadcast.

The third round broadcast was actually one of the best of the year. NBC rarely went to commercial and showed plenty of actual golf shots instead of the video essays and personal interest story diversions that often seep into a broadcast instead of the competition. At one point, Dan Hicks went out of his way to say they had gone 45 minutes without a commercial break. With a bunched-up leaderboard, there’s the potential for lots of movement and a chaotic finish. The Ryder Cup was a blowout, and last year’s farewell to the U.S. Open was a bore, so NBC could use a little drama and some of the big names making a run at The Players. Here are your coverage options for the final round:

2 to 7 p.m. -- NBC