The week sees action at The Open tee off at Royal Portrush, which hosts the Open for the first time since 1951 as Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka, Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson headline this year’s action on NBC and Golf Channel Golf Channel has TV coverage of Thursday’s first round and Friday’s second round, with Golf Channel airing coverage of the early portion of Saturday and Sunday coverage, before NBC takes over for the last major of the year. Overall, the company serves up 410 total hours around the event, the most ever, with 200 hours of linear programming and 210 complementary hours of streaming coverage. NBC Sports golf analysts Notah Begay and Peter Jacobsen joined NBC Sports President of Programming Jon Miller to discuss the Open with press last week.

Miller on hyping the Open: The Open Championship is a relatively new property for NBC. We’ve had it for four Open Championships now. We continue to invest and make it bigger and better. We bring the entire company to bear. So we use all the assets of NBC Universal and of Comcast to make sure it’s as widely available and promoted and marketed and hopefully viewed as possible. It’s led by Tommy Roy, who is a brilliant executive producer, and probably in my career I’ve never seen anybody who approaches Tommy Roy’s levels of expertise. We put so much into what we do at the Open and making it a big event.

Now that the PGA TOUR has changed their schedule so that the Players Championship moved into March and the PGA Championship moving into May, this makes The Open Championship the last major of the year. So it takes on that much more importance, that much more relevance and that much more of a sense of urgency for those players who really need to raise their game and get to the highest level.

Jacobsen on the Open: I don’t know how many Opens I played in, but I’ve always found it to be the most difficult major championship to win. I never won any of the four, but I competed in all four. And what it takes to win an Open Championship is everything. You can play in all kinds of inclement weather. You can get beautiful weather like this. You can get wind. You can get rain. You have to be prepared to play golf in shirt sleeves or in sweaters or in rain gear. And I found that that was a challenge that sometimes it is hard to handle. But I really enjoyed that aspect. I really loved playing in an Open Championship. I’ve played Portrush before. I know they’ve changed the golf course a little bit the last couple of years, but having been involved the last four Open championships for NBC Sports, I can’t wait to get there.

Begay on golf in US vs. UK: It’s very point to point, but golf in the UK and Scotland and in this particular venue, in Ireland, is going to be more creative. It’s going to be more curvy. There’s going to be a lot of unexpected challenges and some fortunate breaks and some bad breaks. And the players that I think mentally have the capacity to deal with those things on a day-to-day basis are the ones that typically put themselves in contention on a consistent basis.