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ESPN Boosting Coverage of PGA Tour Playoffs

· Yahoo Sports

Coverage of the PGA Tour’s FedExCup Playoffs, which begin Thursday, will look a little different for golf fans than it has in recent years.

ESPN is broadcasting two hours of first- and second-round coverage for all three postseason events, marking the first time the network has aired live playoff action. The move comes after a successful trial run of sorts in January at the Farmers Insurance Open when Brooks Koepka made his first PGA Tour start since leaving LIV Golf. ESPN averaged 393,000 viewers during its six hours of coverage (12-3 p.m. ET during the first and second rounds), simulcasting the primary PGA Tour Live feed that typically only streams on the ESPN app.

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At this week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship, ESPN anchor Michael Eaves will host the network’s live coverage from 9-11 a.m. ET on Thursday and Friday. Eaves will serve the same role at next week’s BMW Championship and the season-ending Tour Championship. ESPN is planning to roll out enhanced production elements compared to regular PGA Tour Live streams, including extra cameras and drones, enhanced player audio, and 3D hole and course modeling.

Amid the shift to linear, the PGA Tour is controlling player pairings like it does during the regular season, as opposed to its traditional postseason model of grouping players based on their FedExCup rankings. That allowed it the flexibility this week to pair top-ranked Scottie Scheffler with Rory McIlroy (No. 6) instead of No. 2-ranked Matt Fitzpatrick. Scheffler and McIlroy tee off at 9:30 a.m. ET in the first round, giving them 90 minutes on ESPN. The PGA Tour will control early-round pairings again at the BMW Championship but will use the traditional FedExCup rankings-based pairings at the Tour Championship.

To make way for playoffs coverage, the second hour of Get Up and the first hour of First Take are getting bumped from ESPN to ESPN2 on Thursday and Friday. ESPN programming has been giving the FedExCup Playoffs more promotion, too; Open Champion Ryan Fox was interviewed this week on First Take, which rarely covers golf.

Network Shuffle

Jim Nantz and CBS will broadcast weekend coverage of the FedExCup Playoffs for just the second time ever and first time since 2023. NBC has broadcast the last two editions, but the postseason will now rotate between two networks every other year through 2030 under the PGA Tour’s $700 million annual media rights deals. Before the PGA Tour moved its postseason from September to August in 2019, NBC broadcast the playoffs, as CBS aired college football and NFL games on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in September.

Golf Channel, now under Versant ownership after the company spun off from Comcast, will continue its traditional afternoon coverage of the FedExCup Playoffs during each event’s first and second rounds and during early-afternoon TV windows on the weekend.

The post ESPN Boosting Coverage of PGA Tour Playoffs appeared first on Front Office Sports.

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McDonald's Announces Eight Hello Kitty x Godzilla Toys Coming to Happy Meals This August

· IGN

Hello Kitty and Godzilla are coming to McDonald’s Happy Meals this August in one of the most highly-anticipated collaborations to ever hit the fast food franchise.

Starting August 18, eight toys combining Sanrio’s most popular mascots and a few of the most iconic monsters from the Godzilla films will be available in Happy Meals at participating locations within the United States.

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McDonald’s confirmed the full list of toys on August 12, sharing a graphic that showed each figure and the special Godzilla-themed box they’ll come in. (Along with your nuggets and fries, of course.)

The full list of toys is as follows:

  • Hello Kitty x Godzilla
  • My Melody x Mothra
  • Kuromi x Mechagodzilla
  • Keroppi x King Ghidora
  • Badz-Maru x Rodan
  • Cinnamoroll x Destoroyah
  • Chococat x Spacegodzilla
  • Pompompurin x Gigan

It’s nice to see such a wide variety of characters represented in this collaboration; real Sanrio fans will know that Chococat rarely makes an appearance in big collabs like this, not to mention Badz-Maru. The same is true on the Kaijus’ end of things — how many of us can say that we’ve seen Destoroyah or Gigan included in a mainstream Godzilla toy line?

Responses to this upcoming collab have been nothing short of ecstatic. McDonald’s’ tweet revealing the toys has sparked no end of excitement among Kaiju fans and Sanrio enthusiasts alike, though some are expressing concerns over the possibility that scalpers might ruin things for everyone.

These fears aren’t unwarranted; scalpers have been known to target exclusive Happy Meal items in the past, infamously causing chaos during the chain’s partnerships with Pokemon over the years. In 2021, scalpers bought up the Pokemon 25th anniversary Happy Meals, reselling the trading card packs inside for hundreds of dollars online.

And in 2025, McDonald’s Japan ended its Pokemon card promotion after scalpers showed up in droves to buy Happy Meals just to get at the packs inside, leaving food waste and packaging strewn outside.

Scalpers don’t limit themselves to cards, either; the 2026 Pokemon merch collaboration with Target suffered a similar fate, as did the resurgence of limited-edition Pokemon poptarts, which were spotted on eBay listings for upwards of $25 - $50 earlier this year.

This is far from the first time McDonald's and Hello Kitty have teamed up with another franchise for Happy Meal toys. In 2024, McDonald's Belgium released a line of Hello Kitty x Yu-Gi-Oh! toys in one of the strangest collaborations we've seen thus far.

Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.

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Big Walk devs talk the Australian bush and friendslop: 'I'd prefer the second word wasn't slop'

· PC Gamer

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