The Break: A radical new PGA Tour?

A fresh set of eyes?

Brian Rolapp is the new PGA Tour CEO, and talking about anything that a sports league executive says can often make for an Ambien replacement. However, since Rolapp is new in the gig, what he says carries more weight and is worthy of more consideration than it will in a few years’ time. For the former NFL exec, his public taking-the-torch moment was ahead of this week’s Tour Championship, which has historically been when the PGA Tour’s executive (formerly a commissioner, now a CEO) gets in front of the media and lays out the state of the Tour.

Rolapp isn’t a golf guy, and so, for better or worse, he isn’t beholden to the traditions of the PGA Tour. He made that evident in Atlanta, suggesting he’s willing to look at significant, if not radical, changes to the PGA Tour schedule and how the product is presented and broadcast to not only golf fans but the broader world.

He made it clear that he’s aware of golf fans complaining about the FedEx Cup playoffs. He knows that points don’t really make sense. He gets that the playoff format isn’t particularly compelling. He knows the Tour Championship has to be a bigger deal. He knows that TV coverage can be downright unwatchable when diluted with ads and drowning amid slow play. Awareness is one thing; doing something about it is another.

Rolapp wants the PGA Tour to have three things: competitive parity (which he believes it has, despite Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy dominating the Tour this year), simplicity and, perhaps most jarringly, an element of scarcity. To the trained ear, that last part sounds like he wants to dethatch the schedule, so to speak. Rolapp isn’t as concerned about the old executive mandate to generate as many playing opportunities as possible for PGA Tour members — particularly those at the back half of the FedEx Cup points list — as he is about giving fans a reason to tune into every event and understand what’s at stake. (There’s a longer discussion to be had here about his football background influencing his mindset as opposed to, say, baseball and basketball, which have absolute grinds of a regular season.)

Before Rolapp signed on, the PGA Tour was already moving to a system that more consistently rewards the best players with enormous paydays and fewer exempt players. Fields will be smaller, and open qualifying opportunities will be reduced. Another leap could include reducing the number of opposite-field events, or it could mean reducing or eliminating exemption categories that test the memories of even long-time golf fans.

Rolapp has a mandate, of sorts, to make these changes because the star players have bought in and largely cajoled the lesser-known players into going along. Ratings are up this year. People have bought into Scottie Scheffler as the new dominant world No. 1. LIV Golf continues in the periphery, and it doesn’t seem to have any tangible impact.

The question for Rolapp is how much change the players and the fans actually want and pressing the right buttons to get there.

The Links

Check out the latest episode of Talking GolfGetaways, with Mitch Laurance talking about his Arran Island golf trip with Scotsman Greg McCrae. It really gets the juices flowing to plan a golf trip!

LIV Golf decided to revoke a previously approved media credential for a Michigan golf media member, Bill Hobson, after he wouldn’t take down a podcast episode with Pat Perez that they arranged. Bizarre stuff.

We have a wealth of golf this weekend, including the CPKC Open on the LPGA, the Betfred British Masters on the DP World Tour, the US Senior Women’s Open, The Ally Challenge on the PGA Tour Champions, the Epson Tour and LIV Golf’s team championship finale.

The Tour Championship isn’t going to be what you want

The FedEx Cup will be awarded for the 19th time this week at East Lake, and there still has been no solid consensus built around how the trophy and its related big pot of money should be decided.

After six years of trying a handicap tournament, they got rid of that and finally went back to the revolutionary concept of a 72-hole shootout to determine the winner. Even more jarring is there are no advantages for any player heading into the $40 million tournament, meaning there’s no whiteboards, calculators or abacuses (abaci?) needed to figure out the actual big winner come Sunday evening. I’m calling that progress.

Some folks are convinced that the top seed or a small group of seeds should have some kind of advantage. Some want there to be a 12-round playoff played over the three events. Some are pining hard for match play and got really excited when that idea was floated in early spring as a potential new format in 2025.

The format is going to change again, likely for 2026, to something different. There will be folks who are mad about whatever it is, and there are people who will cosplay online as crisis actors that are alarmed that the integrity of golf playoffs are compromised by whatever new way $100 million is awarded to 150 people.

As I get older, I care less about such minutiae. I’m happy to get three very good fields together in consecutive weeks in August, just before football starts. Could they be bigger fields? Sure. Could the format be more creative? Absolutely. But the FedEx Cup playoffs has done its long-stated goal of making golf relevant just before Labor Day. That’s a win!

If Scottie Scheffler doesn’t win this week and get awarded the $10 million bonus for taking the season-long title, it’s not going to diminish his year at all. If he does win, it’ll mean that he earned the same $33 million on FedEx Cup-related bonus money as he did last year.

If any of the other 29 players win this week, particularly those just happy to be there and get a guaranteed half-million-dollar-plus payday and entry into all four majors next year, then it’ll be a nice story to cap off an otherwise fantastic year.

Whatever happens, it’s been a fun 2025. And we still have the Ryder Cup to go!