The list of takeaways from Tuesday’s PGA Tour announcement was so long it feels worthy of another distinction. It’s more of a scroll, and not the kind you do on your phone. The tour’s own FAQ sheet sent to the media took seven pages to answer all of our possible questions… and that was BEFORE Its CEO answered 45 minutes of additional questions during a press conference.
So yeah, Tuesday was a lot. You can read about it all here. But if your attention span can take it, come back to this part for the one detail that many people are overlooking. The one detail that really makes a new competitive model palatable to the entire tour membership: the predictability of the schedule.
A little-known fact about current life on the PGA Tour is that it’s one big game of musical chairs, with not nearly enough seats for everyone to sit down. Some courses in the summer, with peak hours of the day, are 144 players strong. Other fields, in the spring, boast only 132 players. Still other courses, technically in the winter, only have 120. And how many unique players, right now, have some access to PGA Tour events?
More than 200. Closer to 250. The number is not clearly defined, because access to the tour is not so simply defined and this fog makes planning a schedule difficult.
England’s Matt Wallace is ranked 83rd in the world, but his access to the PGA Tour is poor: No. 167 in priority order. Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen’s OWGR ranking is slightly worse, 86th, but his Tour Access ranking is much better: 129th. Neergaard-Petersen was able to get into the WM Phoenix Open while Wallace was not. But the Dane has not played very well, so he has competed zero from the $20 million Signature Events. Wallace, on the other hand, has played in three Signature Events.
The conclusion may only be clear to people connected to professional golf: no player really they knew what their schedule would be when the year started. Neither is consistently competing against Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy. They are both making a schedule as the weeks and months go by. And now the tough time is coming if either of them will be members of the PGA Tour next year.
A very important, albeit very quiet, part of the future PGA Tour structures announced Tuesday is that whenever a new PGA Tour season begins, more than 200 golfers will know JUST in which tournaments they will play. On January 1 of each year, they will either have 21 hitting starts in the Championship Series, or they will get 20 starts in the Challenger Series. That’s 21 starts in $20 million events, or 20 starts in events of at least $4 million.
It’s not hard to spot a difference there. But you know what’s a worse case scenario? Graduating to the PGA Tour and then landing on the alternate list, a couple go out, traveling to Phoenix or Torrey Pines and hoping a player snaps their back within driving distance, opening up a spot in the field. This happened for many players down the priority list in recent seasons. Korn Ferry Tour alumni have arrived on the PGA Tour and had to accept forced layoffs, all because they couldn’t get onto a course because the Tour itself was blown out. They were forced to be patient, waiting to play at the end of April, May, June and July – at which point they were already playing from a points deficit.
These days, lower-level Tour pros feel compelled to play as much as possible to maintain their status. They can’t be at every wedding or bachelor party – or at least they can’t commit right away. Only when they earn and lock status does the calendar begin to relax for them. You don’t believe me? Ask a guy who’s been there before.
“(The predictability of the schedule) was really something that was reserved for the top 30 players, maybe the top 50 players,” Maverick McNealy said Tuesday. “Knowing what they were going to play at the beginning of the year, and now we have over 200 members who will know on January 1st every tournament they’re on.
“It’s going to be a big quality-of-life thing, and for a lot of the membership, they’re going to be playing for very high financial opportunities, while still maintaining a much cleaner system to move up and down and identify the best players.”
This predictability works both ways. Player no. 70 will know every date they are competing and will also know every other player they need to beat during the season to finish in the top 90 and retain membership. Player no. 170, below in the Challenger Series, will know every date he will compete and will not be fighting for space in those events. No one is going to elbow him off the field – everyone is starting in the same place and fighting for those 20 promoted positions.
This is the simplicity Brian Rolapp was looking for. The kind that fans can follow, but also the kind that makes perfect sense for Tour players as well.
