Maybe Woods will win his fifth green jacket Sunday, maybe he won't. His bogeys on the finishing hole during the first two rounds didn't help.

But you can be sure CBS will keep his name very much in the mix when it takes over coverage this weekend. Anyone who has watched golf for the last decade knows the Tiger rules. He's worth an awful lot of eyeballs.

Here's a more accurate assessment:

According to Nielsen, after Wood's season-ending knee injury last year, ratings for tournaments he had played in 2007 dropped almost in half. When Woods played in 2007, an average of 4.57 million viewers tuned in. Without Woods last year, 2.4 million viewers tuned in.

As for the Masters, here's why CBS can't help but ROOT for Woods.

CBS has averaged 11.9 million viewers during final-round coverage of the four Masters won by Woods. In the eight Masters not won by Woods since 1997, CBS averaged 20 percent fewer viewers (9.5 million).

bhorn@dallasnews.com

Release of schedule

next NFL TV event

We should have seen this coming. First the NFL draft became a television event. Then came the NFL combine.

Now the release of the NFL schedule.

NFL Network, in need of all the programming it can get, will present the 2009 regular-season schedule - 256 games - at 6 p.m. Tuesday. The cable network has scheduled two hours for the "event," which means there will be lots of over analysis,

Not to be outdone, ESPN will counter with three hours of programming on the schedule. Coverage begins at 6 p.m. on ESPN2 before shifting to ESPN at 7 p.m.

ESPN on 100-0

ESPN's Outside the Lines at 8 a.m. Sunday gets around to looking at Covenant's 100-0 victory over Dallas Academy in January.

The piece includes the first TV interview with former Covenant coach Micah Grimes and edited video of the game as supplied by a Covenant parent. Dallas Academy refused ESPN's interview requests.

Asked if he thought his team ran up the score, Grimes, who said scoring 100 points was not his goal, told ESPN, "I think it's a wide margin of victory."

In a news release, ESPN also quotes Grimes on the Dallas Academy team: "It was obvious that ... we were playing a team that was, I should say, they were talented in a sense, but they were not basketball players. And after I noticed that, we just pulled back and played a zone for the remainder of the game."

I don't know what Outside the Lines' conclusions will be, but in the interest of balanced reporting, it was searching during midweek for "experts" who might defend the concept of lopsided victories.

Rangers report

The Rangers' season opener Monday before a packed house in Arlington scored a 3.1 rating for KDFW (Channel 4). That translates to approximately 77,190 homes.

Wednesday night's second game of the season, which attracted 27,000 fewer paying customers to the Ballpark, pulled a 3.0 (74,700 homes) on Fox Sports Southwest against heavy competition from the Mavericks-Jazz, which pulled a combined 5.1 (127,000 homes) on KTXA (Channel 21) and ESPN.

Fox Sports Southwest and Verizon Fios came to an 11th-hour agreement Wednesday afternoon that ensured Verizon subscribers wouldn't have 50 Rangers games dropped from their cable package this season. Wednesday's would have been the first one.

Someone has to do something about the split-screen Rangers promos in the guise of Jim Knox interviews when the ball is in play. They have already reached disastrous proportions.

Hard Knocks anyone? Apparently not

NFL Films and HBO traditionally use the window between the Super Bowl and the draft to troll for prospective teams for their Hard Knocks training camp series. It looks doubtful there will be a 2009 edition.

HBO Sports boss Ross Greenburg told the Miami Herald it has been difficult finding a team willing to follow the 2008 Cowboys. "Certain teams you don't even bother to call - including anyone who is a descendant of Bill Parcells," Greenburg said.

Of course, you never say never with these things, but the Cowboys - with their media-shy head coach, a quarterback who wasn't interested in participating last summer, and sans Terrell Owens and PacMan Jones - apparently aren't a contender.

Here, by the way, were the top-five TV markets for last summer's edition: San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Austin and Dallas.

Around the Horn

*The Fox Sports Southwest family is grieving the loss of Steve Hill, who died last week at age 45. Hill, an advertising sales executive, had been with the cable network since it launched in 1996. Co-workers describe him as a larger than life, fun-loving guy who was passionate about sports and loved to talk his way into sporting events. His major claim in that category was the Masters. Fittingly, Hill's memorial service was at the House of Blues on Thursday, complete with hors d'oeuvres.

*CBS' online streaming video game coverage of the men's NCAA Tournament attracted 7.52 million unique visitors, up 58 percent from 2008's 4.62 million. It's also more than five times the 1.4 million unique visitors in 2007.

*Dallas golf producer extraordinaire Mickey Holden's Stories of Augusta at 1:30 p.m. leads into CBS' Masters coverage on Saturday.

*HBO offers up Thrilla in Manila, a 90-minute documentary at 7 p.m. today. It that examines the third and final Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. The documentary is certainly no bouquet, just a gritty tale of the 1975 fight and all the accompanying drama as told from Frazier's viewpoint. Frazier has fared better health-wise than Ali, but he is far from unscarred by a lifetime in the ring.