CBS Sports Chief: What, Me, Worry About Tiger Woods?

To CBS Sports golf anchor Jim Nantz, this season has been a harbinger of things to come on the links, as the next generation of stars prepares to take their places in the firmament.

Nantz, appearing on a network conference call Tuesday to drum up an audience for CBS' weekend coverage of the PGA Championship from Kohler, Wis., praised the emergence of young players like Japan's 18-year-old Ryo Ishikawa, who shot a 58 in a round during a May tournament in his homeland, Louis Oosthuizen of South Africa who won the British Open last month at the age of 27 and Rory McIlroy, the Northern Ireland native who became the first player since Tiger Woods to win a PGA Tour event before his 21st birthday earlier this year.

"I think it's been a great year for the game," Nantz said. "Long term, this is what the game needed. The next generation needed to be identified. There are a bunch of guys just in their 20s who have broadened this out as far as possible winners past five or six. This is where the game is going. It's going young and it's going international."

That kind of talk may be great for Nantz and the serious golf fan, but for the casual viewer who makes up most of the audience for majors, lack of familiarity with players on the leaderboard can be a turn off.

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Indeed, Oosthuizen's final round at St. Andrews drew the lowest ratings for a British Open here, while Sunday's final round at the Bridgestone Invitational drew ratings that were off 51 percent from 2009. And with Woods, the tour's top-ranked and best-known player, seemingly in freefall on the course, CBS Sports President Sean McManus, should, in theory, be ordering an IV drip of Pepto-Bismol or Maalox.

Yet, McManus, who also is president of CBS News, claims not to be alarmed about what the weekend's numbers may yield, even if Woods and Phil Mickelson aren't in contention.

"You wait and see what the storyline is and how it develops," McManus said. "Just because one of those two guys might or might not be on the leaderboard, I don't worry about it because I can't control it. I just hope the storyline whether it involves Tiger or Phil or one of the new young guns that Jim (Nantz) talks about, you wait and see what develops and you hope for the best and hope that there's drama and when the final group comes to the 18th hole that the tournament is not yet decided."

McManus says if the young guns win and win regularly, there is "the potential to attract or at least keep the fans that are watching now." Yet, he admits that CBS will have to keep an eye (no pun intended) on ratings during the next two years while the network has the PGA Championship and the bulk of PGA Tour events, with particular focus on Woods.

"I think you have to monitor pretty closely how his (Woods) golf game develops to see how often he is in contention and then factor in to all the other variables and try to quantify when you're putting a value on a sports property and the value has been inflated in recent negotiations because of Tiger," McManus said.