Kevin Kisner said CBS left him so confused during Masters weekend that he was better off following the app than the broadcast feed.
Kisner, who worked as a guest analyst during SiriusXM’s coverage of Saturday’s and Sunday’s rounds, blasted the network after Rory McIlroy won his second straight Masters on Sunday at Augusta National, becoming the first golfer since Tiger Woods in 2001 and 2002 to take back-to-back titles. Kisner said CBS was showing shots he knew had happened 10 minutes earlier all day long, and said he texted Colt Knost during the show to ask whether they ever showed a live shot.
The criticism landed on the same day CBS and Paramount+ carried the final round of the 90th Masters with Jim Nantz on the call, and after cameras lost track of McIlroy’s second shot on the 18th hole as it landed in the woods right of the fairway. Coverage of the tournament was spread across broadcast networks and streaming, and CBS’s final-round feed drew complaints from some viewers about the delay in shot coverage.
Kisner’s complaint cut at the heart of how Masters broadcasts work. CBS has polished its Augusta coverage over decades into what is widely viewed as golf broadcasting’s gold standard, but it also uses a brief tape delay for some shots rather than airing every moment live. That system helps the network manage the event’s unusual rhythm, since multiple players can be hitting at once and the Masters has limited commercial interruption compared with NFL games, which are built around several planned breaks.
Still, Kisner said the result felt detached from the actual tournament. He compared it to watching the Super Bowl with plays from seven minutes earlier and said the coverage was a fantasy world. For a day that ended with McIlroy joining Woods as the only back-to-back Masters winner in more than two decades, the sharpest debate centered not on the champion’s score but on how much of the drama viewers were seeing as it happened.
