I’ll begin with a confession. I haven’t watched much of the PGA Tour this autumn season. I’ve followed Seamus Power’s progress with intrigue but outside that I’ve had no interest supporting a tour that repeatedly makes it clear it has no interest in me, or any fans for that matter. Well, so long as the money keeps flowing in.
Whether that arrives in the shape of Saudi dollars suddenly good enough for Jay Monahan’s prying pockets remains to be seen with a certain tabloid reporting a $1.3 billion deal with the devil to be nearing its end.
It’s fair to say that at this stage negotiations between the PIF and PGA Tour have dragged on to a point of irrelevance for most fans. Perhaps thought leaders at tour HQ are trying to bore us to death, or at least enough to erase our memories so that revolutionary announcements of “new look” tours pass as fresh facing ideas and not closed shop fronts.
The latest predictable play sees the tour’s Player Advisory Council looking out for their own pockets by deploying the old ‘pull that ladder up behind you’ trick that must’ve inspired their latest reforms.
Why else, after more than a year of PGA Tour cool aid drinkers delivering the party’s meritocracy line in defiance of LIV, would the tour double down on its banal unveiling of signature events this season with further reduced fields proposed for 2026?
If you haven’t seen, under the proposal full field events will fall from 156 to 144 players as the tour opts to cut opportunities rather than cancers by enforcing slow play penalties to solve traffic issues. The Players Championship, once the strongest field in golf, will fall from 144 Thursday tee times to 120. The tour’s feeder Korn Ferry circuit will see only 20 promotion spots to the Promised Land, down from 30. While in an unnecessary gut punch to the dreamers, Monday Qualifying will disappear for events with 120 players or less, while only two qualifiers will make 132-player fields, down from four in 2024.
In some good news, though bad for the bubble boys, full status will only be retained by the top-100 in the FedEx Cup standings instead of the previous 125, meaning the tour may shed some deadwood in that regard. Then again, with the way points are lopsidedly distributed, it’s harder to get off the PGA Tour these days than on it so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Sadly, the way I see it, golf’s popularity has been pulverised in recent years and these proposals won’t help. Monahan has failed upwards as strength of fields fade and viewership figures fall. The pro game is shrinking while the wealth of the old guard swells. And I’m not sure there’s anything meritorious about that.
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