The NFL is king, we all know that. To avoid a head-to-head matchup with the sports juggernaut, the PGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Open will be held Wednesday to Saturday next week at Torrey Pines, so as to not have its final round swallowed up by the NFL’s conference title games.
This has created an interesting situation for CBS star Jim Nantz. Like so many of us who work remotely, Nantz will do so as well.
“Next week, the week of the AFC Championship game, will debut our season coverage of the PGA Tour, I’m going to call Friday and Saturday night’s action from the stadium, wherever the AFC Championship game is being held,” Nantz told reporters on a Zoom conference call Wednesday.
As he points out, the AFC Championship game “will be the most-watched show on the CBS Television Network for the calendar year of 2022,” and thus the network needs their main voice at the football game. But don’t think Nantz is taking his golf duties lightly next week.
“I can say this: I didn’t want to miss it,” he said. “San Diego—we always call Torrey Pines at the Farmers Insurance Open—falls victim to the elongated NFL season, now that it’s gone to 18 weeks in the regular season.” He added that Sean J. McManus, chairman of CBS Sports, and his team “came up with a tremendous game plan to end this event on Saturday night in prime time back in the east, and I wanted to be a part of it. It definitely will not compromise anything that I’m doing on the football side.”
Nantz, known for his ties to Pebble Beach, noted on the call that he also now splits his time in Nashville, which happens to have the No. 1 seed in the AFC, in the Titans. There’s a chance Nantz can sleep in his own bed next week. His hectic week will start this Sunday.
“We have the Sunday night game in Kansas City,” he said. “Monday I’m in New York shooting a Capital One commercial with Spike Lee that runs during March Madness. Tuesday I will be home in Nashville.
“I’m going to be in place on Wednesday, wherever the AFC Championship game is, because the tournament (Farmers) is going to start that day. So I want to watch the coverage, every minute of it, on Wednesday and Thursday.
“On Friday and Saturday, our two CBS broadcast days [for golf], those are 5 o’clock Eastern time starts, and again I’m just going to go with the 1-seed at the moment and say we’re going to be in Nashville, because they have home-field. It may not play out that way but that will be a 4 o’clock broadcast [for football]. I would say at some point around 2 o’clock, about two hours before the broadcast to make sure the signal and everything is on time and there’s not a lag and we’re coordinated. I will be at the stadium and I’ll not in all likelihood be in the broadcast booth where we’ll call the game on Sunday but probably be in a truck inside the stadium, in a production truck. And away we go. I’m looking forward to it very much.”
Nantz, who’s also been doing the March Madness to the Masters stretch for 36 years, admits he has a special place in his heart for golf.
“You find after all these years that the anticipation of the next season is something that is part of your life,” he said. “My longing for golf to come back in my life again is the one that I feel the most and I didn’t want to miss being a part of it with my teammates.”
