Is next week’s PGA Tour field a problem? Or just the truth?

Next week’s PGA Tour event, the Cadillac Championship, is just the latest in the Signature Event series — the limited, $20 million free-for-all field that 99% of the pros desperately want to play. And there’s good news for that super majority — technically, two sponsor exemptions haven’t been finalized yet.

Normally, the Saturday before most Signature Event fields are set. You have last year’s top 50, a handful of winners from this season, the 10 players not already included who played best this year, and five more who played best recently. On top of that, as has become controversialthere are always four exceptions from sponsors who, quietly, are not always decided until the last minute.

The reason is clear: if a player can qualify themselves, it’s obviously better optics for them and their game than using a sponsor exemption. For the sponsor, it’s also a great scenario because their list of choices is always longer than four. Any player from the sponsor’s unpublished priority ranking who plays his way simply allows Sponsor’s Pick no. 5 to join the field.

That actually happened for RBC and his post-Masters Heritage tour. During Masters week, Max Homa was included as a sponsor exception on the Tour’s domestic field list until he played well enough at Augusta National to qualify for the Heritage without needing a sponsor invitation. It’s a win-win – Homa gets in and RBC can invite another of his favourites. They went with Wyndham Clark, Tony Finau, Billy Horschel and Marco Penge – whose order is not made public.

This retelling matters for next week’s tournament, a newly created signature event on an old-time tour course, Trump National Doral. Only Joel Dahmen and Max Greyserman are listed as sponsor exemptions at the moment – ​​both worthy picks, neither of whom will win their way at the last minute like Homa did after missing the cut at this week’s Zurich Classic. They will be joined by two more, to be decided on Sunday night, a selection that has not been finalized because … there are some big names on the verge of being replaced and fewer big-name players interested in playing, period.

Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele, Bob MacIntyre, Ludvig Aberg and Matt Fitzpatrick – all ranked in the world’s top 15 – will spend next week in Miami. (For McIlroy, it will be the second Signature Event to be skipped this season.) Altogether, it’s the most significant voluntary departure of talent that any Signature Event has seen to date, and there’s a painfully obvious reason: Most pros are fine playing three events in a row. But some definitely don’t want to play a major championship in that third week.

As always with the PGA Tour’s Rubik’s Cube planning outEmma, ​​there is no specific element to blame for this matter. And once you choose for one side of the cube – like finding a new, massive sponsor engagement. This is a positive! — you can easily break the other sides. In the simplest sense, the Cadillac Championship didn’t exist last year. When pros build their annual commitment list, this spot feels more like a surprise than anything else. It also sits directly before another signature event, the Truist Championship at Quail Hollow, which sits directly before the PGA Championship in Philadelphia. It feels like it can be skipped if the other weeks don’t.

Generally, most top pros are set on a schedule of 22 to 26 events. That way, they don’t play more than half of the calendar year. Brian Rolapp is well aware of this number, as are the billionaire investors of his product. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, one of the pro game’s biggest investors, is also well aware. Rory McIlroy bluntly stated that “26 weeks” is the maximum for top pros during a meeting a few years ago. A tournament that gets top pros to play 22 to 26 times can be a great commercial product, as long as those 22 to 26 events are … the same events. But that remains the problem of the moment: what events fit into that 22- to 26-event schedule, and HOW he set during the January-August calendar so you can get McIlroy to appear as much as possible. Throwing a signing event the week before a signing event held the week before a major is NO in the future of the tournament. You can count on that.

Distribution of these key events – “Track 1” events, as they are likely to be invoked in the future – will not appease everyone, but until they are placed in sensitive places on the calendar, there will be slippery results like the voluntary skipping of the main professionals. That means nothing for Texas-based players who want to play two weeks in the following The PGA Championship, at CJ Cup Byron Nelson and the Charles Schwab Challenge. Scottie Scheffler will defend his title in the first — and the PGA Championship, too — but he’s not in the field for the Truist Championship, another $20 million in freebies for the entire week before the PGA. Different professionals have different priorities – we know that. But it has brought about an intriguing reality: between the Masters and the PGA Championship, three Signature Events will have been played. McIlroy and Scheffler will never have competed against each other.

It can be dizzying to keep track of who’s in and who’s out especially during this SIGNING season, but the results of these fields — who wants in and when — along with the randomness of fan favorites hitting a rough patch, are what make schedule-making a volatile business. It’s what makes Brian Rolapp’s job particularly tricky at the moment, where sponsor involvement, course engagement and the competitive structure are all a bit fluid. The status quo works in many ways, but it mostly depends on star players showing up and playing like star players. Every week when this is underplayed by those players simply not turning up, it underlines it even more.