Players Championship 2015 live stream: Time, TV schedule and how to watch online

The PGA Tour’s marquee event tees off Thursday morning at TPC Sawgrass, and there will be multiple ways to watch The Players Championship throughout the first round. Golf Channel will have the six-hour broadcast Thursday afternoon, but PGATour.com will have streams up and running early in the morning so you can avoid work at the office.

Tiger Woods is always the headliner when he shows up at a tournament and he’s back again this year after sitting out with an injury in 2014. Woods won’t go off the first tee until the afternoon on Thursday, so his tee time with defending champ Martin Kaymer and Adam Scott will be the focus of the Golf Channel telecast. Even though he shocked the golf world with his sudden ability to chip the golf ball again at Augusta National, we still don’t have a good idea of what to expect from Woods this week at Sawgrass. While he’s got two career wins here, there’s a whole lot of mediocre-to-bad in between. This has never been a course on his annual schedule that he’s carved up like Torrey Pines or Doral. And given some of the shaky drives and iron shots we saw at the end of the week at the Masters, he could tumble down the board quickly at a penal layout like this if that form holds.

While Tiger is the headliner, the marquee tee time will be out in the morning side of the draw at 8:39 a.m. ET. That’s when Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth and Jason Day will start on the 10th tee. The McIlroy-Spieth pairing is juiciest tee time we’ve had in years on the PGA Tour. Both are hitting or have hit the height of their nascent careers and are 1-2 in the world rankings. The rivalry we all want and are hyping may be starting this week, so it was perfect that the Tour put them together for the first two rounds.

Spieth and McIlroy, however, will play almost their entire round before Golf Channel goes live at 1 p.m. Fortunately, PGATour.com will have a “featured groups” stream going at 8:30 a.m. just before they tee off at the Stadium Course. This stream will show every shot of their opening round, and then switch to a TBD featured group in the afternoon wave.

In addition to that featured group stream, PGATour.com will also have a stream dedicated to the famous island par-3 17th hole. That’s maybe the most famous par-3 in the world, and it also features one of the rowdier crowds surrounding it. It’s definitely not a terrible option to toggle off and on with the McIlroy-Spieth battle early in the morning before the telecast. Once TV goes live, however, you’ll also be able to watch a full simulcast of that coverage via Golf Channel’s LiveExtra service.

This is Golf Channel’s top tournament for the season, so the options are expanded well beyond their normal first round coverage. Here are all your media options for the first round:

1 to 7 p.m. -- Golf Channel

8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. -- PGATour.com featured groups stream -- McIlroy/Spieth/Day in a.m., TBD in p.m.

1 to 7 p.m. -- Golf Channel simulcast stream

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