2015 TOUR Championship streaming: How to watch live online, TV coverage and more

Only 36 holes remain in the PGA Tour season, but now that the weekend has arrived, it all will get drowned out by football for most interested parties. The FedExCup is a contrived postseason that has its flaws. But it is better than the alternative and the meaningless golf that preceded its creation. The tour struggles after the season’s final major in mid-August, but at least this event draws the biggest names in the game at extremely lucrative events.

One of the bigger flaws, and it is probably just an intractable challenge, is that the FedExCup playoffs end up having to compete with football over the final two or three events. That’s a losing proposition and there’s not much they can do in the schedule to change it. College football overwhelms Saturday’s sports landscape and the NFL owns the entire fall season, especially on Sundays.

Saturday’s third round at the TOUR Championship is maybe the biggest reminder that this FedExCup postseason is a smaller fish this time of year. It’s the penultimate round of the season in their playoffs finale, and tee times have been moved up a few hours so the field will be done before Notre Dame kicks off against UMass at 3:30 p.m. ET.

The field at East Lake is always the smallest and most exclusive of the entire season. There are just 30 spots open, and this year, thanks to two withdrawals, only 28 will tee it up on the weekend. That gives the tour and its network partner, NBC, a lot of flexibility in scheduling these last few rounds of the season. So after sending the entire field out in the afternoon for the first two rounds, they will move everyone up on Saturday and have the full field on the course before noon. The first tee time is at 9:20 a.m. ET and the final pairing of Jordan Spieth and Henrik Stenson goes at 11:30 a.m. At one of their bigger events, the tour would usually aim for a 6 or 7 p.m. and not 3:30 finish on a Saturday.

The Golf Channel will have the early morning coverage before switching to their Comcast sister, NBC, at noon for the conclusion of the round. The 28-man field ensures that traffic moves relatively smooth through the course and the rounds should not last more than four hours, and perhaps even come in under that mark. So Spieth and Stenson should be done by 3:30 p.m., barring weather delays. If you’re unable to watch on TV, the coverage will be simulcast online via Golf Channel and NBC’s LiveExtra service. PGA Tour Live will also have a featured holes stream running from the very first tee time of the day. Here are all your media options for an earlier-than-normal Saturday on tour:

10 a.m. to noon -- Golf Channel

Noon to 3:30 p.m. -- NBC