Knowing Matchroom and their close affiliation with Sky Sports, I can tell you that they 100% did not drop the ball. The sad fact is that mainstream sports outlets do not currently care about pool, as the vast majority of the public don't know of or care about the players.
Matchroom's secret sauce has always been to make the public care who wins or loses and that is something that will take time (if at all possible), especially in the US.
It is the model that made snooker a mainstream sport in the UK and snooker players household names. My 78 year old mum, who has never played snooker, still watches all of the snooker tournaments and cheers on certain players and against others. She is not an outlier, a lot of the public are just emotionally invested in the players. This is why they do their little segments on players away from the sport, so that people can from an opinion on the players as people.
For pool to get to that point, I think they need a prime Earl or as they were elite players with charisma that everyone had an opinion about.
Emotional investment is key to viewership, not just in sport but across all media.
