LIV Golf had a great opportunity on Sunday. Did it benefit?

LIV Golf got a chance on Sunday.

The final round of the PGA Tour was postponed due to some really harsh weather conditions at Pebble Beach, giving LIV's first event of the 2024 season the full stage. And it was Jon Rahm's first event as a LIV golfer, with Rahm battling for victory in Mayakoba, Mexico. No matter how much money LIV has spent to get off the ground and fill its 54-man roster, sometimes luck still presents the biggest opportunities you'll get.

So how did the 3 year old product do? I had some thoughts.

Legion before me

Rahm didn't win on Sunday – he finished bogey-bogey, losing the tie for the lead and ceding the podium to Joaquin Niemann and Sergio Garcia for a four-hole play-off, dramatically won by Niemann with the only light on the course coming from the rankings overlooking the 18th green.

Rahm was dejected, as anyone who has ever seen Rahm play golf would imagine, and received some flattery from the LIV broadcast team to acknowledge that his Legion XIII team had won the team competition. It will be interesting to see further how Rahm handles that push and pull. Most of these guys are still determined to only care about their performance, and LIV calls for a reset of priorities.

Rahm's LIV Golf impact

Rahm's biggest impact on the league so far is that his presence seems to have tipped the balance for LIV in terms of relevance.

The initial roster was so full of people who once were and those who never will, that Dustin Johnson felt like a total outlier. Well, Brooks Koepka has made it a little better. So did Bryson DeChambeau. Then Cameron Smith. It still wasn't enough to shake the feeling that every week an established star didn't win the LIV event was a missed opportunity, and if two or three of those guys had a week off it was easy to mocking the rankings.

But Friday's first round felt different with Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton. There were more guys you wanted to see play golf, not out of sentimentality or curiosity, but because you wanted to see the best of the best.

Mayakoba's top 10 included Niemann, Garcia, Rahm, Johnson, Koepka, Hatton, Smith and Louis Oosthuizen. You tell yourself when you turn that down.

Niemann wants to enter Augusta

I'm not sure what to assume about Niemann falling in the winning putt and making much of his victory interview about his exclusion from the major championships. “I'm not majoring,” was the first thing he said when given a microphone. Is it a sign of his competitiveness that his thoughts immediately turned to the next thing, or to something else?

The 25-year-old Chilean has competed in the last 12 majors but is currently on the outside looking into the Masters at number 66 in the world, according to the official World Golf Ranking. (He is ranked 27th on DataGolf.com, taking LIV results into account).

Niemann is in the Open Championship thanks to his victory at the Australian Open in December. Still, he will have to work on Asian Tour events and hope to accumulate enough points to enter the OWGR top 50 before April.

While we were sympathetic to his plight, we all understood the deal here. LIV has had an OWGR problem since day 1.

LIV on television

Let's talk about the broadcast.

First the positives: most of what's on screen is quite good. The leaderboard is a plus, relevant stats are at the ready, and the line-of-put graphic helps the viewer understand what they're looking at. They also did a good job of having the player and caddy discuss the shots, which is the good thing. It also just shows a lot of golf shots, which shouldn't feel all that revolutionary, but for an audience subjected to NBC's PGA Tour broadcasts, it does.

As for everything else? It leaves a lot to be desired.

The biggest problem with a LIV Golf broadcast is that it constantly tries to convince us of something, rather than just letting the events speak for themselves. There's a constant barrage of tweets, which as a story mechanism seem stolen from a 2012 game broadcast anyway – and they're all pretty much the same. That player is great. This is exciting. I'm watching now. They add nothing, and when Arlo White isn't reading them for us, they scroll along the bottom of the screen.

White often finds himself in this position, more pitchman than presenter. There is a three-man booth and two reporters on the court, and plenty of time for them to talk. But there's very little insight offered, and it often feels like they're all just passing the baton on who's going to repeat the company's line this time.

Whether that's how they feel or what's asked of them, it has the same impact. If you keep telling me that everything is great and normal rounds of golf are something more, then when the moment of really high level arrives, there is no higher level to reach. That's why newspapers didn't use the Pearl Harbor font size every day. It wouldn't catch your attention anymore.

So when Niemann chased a 57 on Friday, which would have been the lowest round ever on a major professional golf tour, the broadcast couldn't adequately address the moment. It had nowhere else to go.

LIV has the opportunity to get more attention this year. The price product is much better than when it started. The rest just has to grow along.

(Top photo of Joaquin Niemann: Manuel Velasquez / Getty Images)