The Players Championship 2015: Start time and TV schedule for Friday’s round

The Players Championship is the biggest TV event of the PGA Tour season. The tour, which operates the top tournaments almost every week, actually has no control over the four majors. So, they’ve designated The Players their “fifth major” and put everything they have behind promoting it as such. The media coverage corresponds with the kind of attention a major might get.

In addition to this being the PGA Tour’s premier event, it’s also the top tournament that Golf Channel/NBC own the rights to. NBC lost the U.S. Open, which it held for decades until the USGA took the money and ran to FOX. This will be the first year NBC doesn’t have the national championship, so The Players, especially in a non-Ryder Cup year, is Johnny Miller’s time to shine.

Miller is the most polarizing analyst in golf. He was basically forced out of the game because he struggled to make a putting stroke, but he has no issues sitting in the tower and hammering the modern players for being too nervy, making stupid decisions and struggling with what he deems “easy” shots and putts. He was on fire in the first round, crushing everything in his sight with acerbic jokes and critiques. If you have the right perspective and don’t take it too seriously, Johnny actually makes the broadcast extremely entertaining, especially compared to the alternatives.

Miller will be in the booth again on Friday with Dan Hicks, interchanging with the Golf Channel duo of Terry Gannon and Nick Faldo throughout the six-hour broadcast. Golf Channel will go live much earlier than they normally do for a Friday broadcast, coming on the air at 1 p.m. ET. The coverage window is supposed to run until 7 p.m. ET, but they’ll stick around until the final groups finish up if they contain a player or two that’s near the first page of the leaderboard. They ran up until 7:30 on Thursday, when it was fairly dark on the course but a few leaders had to finish up their first 18.

The marquee group of the afternoon telecast will be the headline tee time of the entire tournament. Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy and Jason Day are set to tee off at 1:49 p.m. so expect to see their every shot throughout the afternoon. The Spieth-McIlroy rivalry hype has crescendoed this week, especially with the work they put in over the past month. It may never become a great rivalry, but we’re pumping it up as such right now and the Tour obliged by putting them together for the first two rounds. They will highlight most of the Friday TV coverage.

Most of Tiger Woods’ round will be done by the time Golf Channel goes live, but you can watch his entire round on a PGATour.com “featured groups” stream throughout the morning. Woods tees off at 8:39 a.m. with Adam Scott and Martin Kaymer. In addition to that featured groups stream, there’s also a stream dedicated to showing every shot at the par-3 island 17th hole. So those are some great options to ignore your work in the morning.

Here are all your media options for the second round: