The PGA Tour Coverage Board permitted intensive adjustments to eligibility and area sizes Monday.
These adjustments, going into impact for the 2026 season, come after stress from followers and sponsors to create a extra partaking product. Nevertheless, the PGA Tour selected to appease its prime gamers below the phantasm of enchancment.
Adjustments embrace lowering exempt standing from prime 125 to prime 100 in FedEx Cup standings and smaller area sizes for occasions. In a statement detailing the tour’s plans, the Coverage Board Participant Director and former Masters champion Adam Scott claims the adjustments “improve the golf fan expertise” and “positively refine the taking part in expertise for our members.”
Theoretically, the very best and hottest gamers will make up a higher proportion of the sphere because the tour hopes to enhance viewership by growing pace of play.
Lucas Glover, at the moment 62nd within the FedEx Cup standings, calls the negotiations “cool child conferences.”
He told Golfweek that the tour is insulting the intelligence of its much less standard members by “attempting to appease six guys and make them completely happy so that they don’t go someplace else and play golf.”
The previous U.S. Open champion additionally told the Golf Channel on the Worldwide Know-how Championship in early November that turning into the one skilled sport to scale back membership as a substitute of develop is “asinine.” He believes it’s extra smart to make sure gamers to play quicker as a substitute of blaming lower-ranked members for a decline in product worth.
The Golf Channel heard a contrasting opinion from Wesley Bryan, the face of probably the most standard YouTube golf channels, “Bryan Bros Golf.” If the season have been to finish right now, Bryan can be the final member given exempt standing for the 2025 season as a result of he sits at 125 within the FedEx Cup standings.
Bryan trusts the “elected gamers” to make correct choices for the PGA Tour “in a very bizarre time [of professional golf].” He claims that apart from “six or seven guys,” different members, together with himself, “don’t at all times put essentially the most thrilling product on the golf course.”
Nevertheless, different standard members supported Glover’s sentiment this week, together with this publish on X from main champion and “Full Swing” star Matt Fitzpatrick.
Max Homa, a prime performer on the PGA Tour, reposted the video under on Instagram of LPGA participant Charley Hull blasting pace-of-play issues.
With the division that exists in skilled golf between LIV and the PGA Tour, gamers have extra energy than ever. The Coverage Board has no choice however to capitulate or the tour dangers additional irrelevance and perhaps even extinction. It’s rightfully scared, for instance, to implement pace-of-play guidelines and lose the help of its stars.
In response to the Sports Business Journal, the PGA Tour “averaged 2.2M viewers for its Sunday telecasts (no majors) in 2024, a drop of 19% from 2.7M in 2023.” Followers aren’t avoiding closing rounds of occasions due to the members on the backside however due to who isn’t competing on the prime.
LIV might not be pulling in spectacular viewership numbers, however it nonetheless stole a number of the recreation’s most spectacular and entertaining gamers.
The PGA Tour’s most important problem just isn’t its variety of members nor the scale of occasion fields however its conflict with LIV. The reply to declining viewership is to not additionally begin a conflict with itself.
Till each excursions convey golf again collectively, the PGA Tour will sacrifice rising the sport for the longer term for its backside line now.