It’s Super Bowl Sunday which also means, more importantly, it’s Waste Management Phoenix Open Sunday. The WMPO has annually taken the Super Bowl week on the PGA Tour schedule, which can be, well, overwhelming.
How to watch the 2017 Waste Management Phoenix Open online, TV schedule and more
The Phoenix Open is always a better alternative than hours of Super Bowl pregame nonsense.
Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images
Of course, 99 percent of the country is way more interested in the Super Bowl than PGA Tour golf this week. But the Phoenix Open has its own strong identity as the rowdiest party in golf that is probably unaffected by Super Bowl week. On Sunday, however, they don’t mess around and do the obvious — get the hell out of the way before kickoff.
Last year that became a problem as Hideki Matsuyama and Rickie Fowler went deep into an extra-holes playoff as the Panthers and Broncos got things started in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the Fowler-Hideki finish, which turned out to be one of the best events of the PGA Tour season, got swept away for the non-hardcore PGA Tour watchers once the game started. That was an anomaly, and this year should be back to a 6 p.m. ET finish on CBS, hopefully leaving a nice 30-minute cushion before the Falcons and Patriots start on FOX.
This is CBS’ second tournament of the season. There’s something a little incongruous about the regal and proper Jim Nantz calling the Phoenix Open, the drunk and absurd show that it is. Sunday will be toned down a bit, as the hangovers set in and the bachelor parties and other traveling groups leave town to get back to their miserable lives and day jobs.
The peak rowdiness is probably Saturday, and this year’s crowd, if you believe the event’s numbers, crested over 206,000 for the third round. The gathering won’t be as big on Sunday, but it’s still larger and probably louder than every other PGA Tour stop.
If you seek some alternative to the endless hours of awful Super Bowl pregame shows and content, the Phoenix Open is a good choice. There’s no need to watch six hours of pregame talking heads drone on about the mundane and ridiculous tangentially related to a football game.
The Phoenix Open TV coverage will start at 1 p.m. ET on Golf Channel, which will have its customary 90-minute window before CBS takes over for the conclusion. That 30-minute coverage gap is a thing that still exists in the year 2017, but fortunately, PGA Tour has just started showing the world feed while the TV goes dark for at least 30 minutes (sometimes much longer thanks to college hoops that run late — e.g. 52 minutes last week at Torrey Pines). It’s not ideal to have to switch to streaming, but at least it’s an option to keep up in the middle of the final round.
The earliest coverage starts at 11:30 a.m. ET and that will be PGA TOUR Live’s full day of streaming the play at the 12th and 16th holes. The featured holes streams do not require a subscription like the featured groups coverage early in the week.
Here’s your full media schedule for the final round at TPC Scottsdale:
Sunday’s final round coverage
Television:
1 to 2:30 p.m. ET — Golf Channel
3 to 6 p.m. ET — CBS
Online streams:
11:30 to 6 p.m. ET — PGA TOUR Live featured holes coverage of No. 12 and famous par-3 16th
1 to 2:30 p.m. ET — Golf Channel LiveExtra simulcast stream
2:30 to 6 p.m. ET — PGATour.com/CBS simulcast stream
Radio:
1 to 6 p.m. ET — PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 92/208 and streamed here)
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