USGA Says Fox Criticism "Consistent with what we got in the past"

John Ourand & John Lombardo of Sports Business Journal wrap up Fox's U.S. Open debut in a story titled "Fox Sports defends coverage of U.S. Open after criticism." (Subscription required.)

Fox executives, forgetting that other than a brief show of humility to kick off Shark Shootout, had set a high bar for innovation. John Entz, president of Fox Sports production:

Other than a few events this summer, like the U.S. Senior Open and the U.S. Women’s Open, Fox does not have the rights to professional golf tournaments. NBC and CBS share the PGA Tour’s rights until 2021.

“The bottom line: This crew is going to be under the gun every year and won’t have the benefit of doing 20 events a year and getting better,” Entz acknowledged. “There’s no doubt that we would benefit from having more events in the lead-up to something as big as the U.S. Open.”

Most fun though was the USGA's assertion that the heavy criticism on social media and in major publications was par for the broadcasting course.

“We hear feedback every year — positive, neutral and negative,” Hirshland said. “That is not new. … The feedback was consistent with what we got in the past. We don’t feel like there was anything atypical about it.”

Nothing?

But the criticism seemed more prevalent and harsher this year, much of it amplified by social media and blogs. Many anticipated a stronger debut from a network that has a history of big-event production.

Still, Entz found much of the criticism to be unfair.

“For someone like [The New York Times] to come in and say, ‘Here’s all the things that went wrong. You need to get better at this,’ it’s like, ‘Oh, really? You think? You thought we were going to be perfect on our first show, which happens to be the size of the Super Bowl?’ Being realistic would go a little way for people that are out looking for blood.

“The part of the criticism that does bother us a little bit is that we felt that people were going in looking for it, and over the course of that many hours of TV, they were going to find things that they didn’t like or things that went wrong.”

But the searching started because the bar was set high by...Fox Sports and the USGA from day one.