Brian Rolapp’s resume may be several pages long, but it’s actually three letters long.
NFL.
Three letters mean a lot in golf, but in football they can be even more consuming. of New PGA C TourEO’s journey to the top spot in professional golf’s biggest tournament took place almost exclusively through the NFL, the world’s most profitable sports entity. His agenda as a league leader in media rights and innovation transformed his career from NFL intern to commissioner Roger Goodell’s right-hand man and the NFL business from several billion dollars to several one hundred billion dollars. It doesn’t take an expert in the inner workings of the PGA Tour to understand the appeal behind his candidacy for tour leader: Bringing in a new three-letter word, NFLin golf.
The logic is sound, if not absolute. Rolapp must want to apply some of the lessons that have made the NFL a resounding success over the past two decades. (He did, after all, help make the NFL LOT rich.) By all indications, he plans to do so. He teased “significant change” at his opening press conference as CEO.
But what kind of change is on the menu? And how much of the NFL is a good thing? As the calendar turns to the fall of 2025, that’s golf’s most important question.
“I say it in America all the time: Golf doesn’t need to be the NFL,” one of the Rolapp pros, Rory McIlroy, said Wednesday. “It doesn’t need to be these other sports. Golf is golf, and that’s fine.”
McIlroy was talking about the kind of effort Rolapp could appreciate: A paid ambassador of golf in Indiawhere he is playing in this week’s DP World Tour event. McIlroy is just the latest professional to take part in an event in the world’s most populous country – an untapped market for golf that could produce the kind of “global growth” often trumpeted by its leaders.
He was talking around something largely unrelated to Rolapp’s change agenda in pro golf: The intensity that seems to permeate fan behavior in other sports but has remained largely removed from golf.
And yet there was something intriguing about the timing of McIlroy’s comments. He enters India after his closest exposure to the NFL-ification of pro golf – a hotly contested Ryder Cup in Bethpage, in which McIlroy and his wife were frequent targets of mob derision well beyond the typical behavior of a golf tournament. Even in the moment, McIlroy seemed troubled by the behavior at Bethpage – and what it represented for his sport more broadly.
Now, with the Tour’s embrace of NFL ideals in progress, McIlroy seemed careful not to let his enthusiasm for growing golf come at the expense of his individuality.
“I think (golf) can definitely grow,” he said. “But you also want to keep the traditions and values ​​that make golf, golf.”
Of course, there’s no indication that Rolapp (or anyone on the PGA Tour, for that matter) has an appetite for a Ryder Cup-style crowd every week on the PGA Tour. And McIlroy has made clear his stance as an agent of positive change in golf: not devoting his waking hours in the early 2020s to efforts aimed at preserving the Tour’s stronghold in the wake of LIV’s incursion.
But could there have been a bit of politics in McIlroy’s response? Maybe.
“You don’t want your sport to be unwelcoming to newcomers. I absolutely understand that,” McIlroy said. “But you also don’t want newcomers to come into the game and destroy centuries of tradition and values ​​of what this game stands for or what it’s about, either.”
In many ways, McIlroy’s comments epitomized the tightrope that Rolapp and the rest of the golf pros must walk now: Innovating without transcending, honoring the past but not clinging too tightly to it.
This is the world the Tour entered when it ushered in the era of player equity from a group of outside investors. It’s also the mountain Rolapp knew he would have to climb at the Tour before landing the top job.
“I think there has to be a balance,” he said. “I certainly think golf can grow, but it can grow in a way where people who are coming into the game still respect and recognize that this is a little bit different than other sports.”
Golf may be different, but it is far from the only sport facing the modernization debate. Basketball broke up its regular season to create an “in-season tournament.” Football created a brand new beginning out of thin air. Baseball introduced a pitch clock and a phantom runner and a larger base and replay review.
Some of these changes were accepted or even appreciated. Many were hated. It will be Rolapp’s job to find the balance.
The goal is to multiply the size and popularity of the pro game, providing a significant financial windfall for all in time for the Tour’s next television rights deal at the end of the decade. That’s an image that can be most appreciated in the world of golf – especially those cashing checks on the PGA Tour.
But in golf, nothing is as simple as three letters. Not even close.
