Big changes are coming to the PGA Tour – are they enough?
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Hello and welcome to this edition of the Golf Channel Podcast with Rex and Lav. We're going to dedicate an entire episode to what could and should happen to the FedEx Cup fall. But instead, on Tuesday, the PGA Tour dropped a 23-page PAC executive document with proposals that, if approved by the policy board in mid-November,

would offer some pretty significant changes to the PGA Tour structure, including for the first time since 1983, scaling back the number of fully exempt members on the PGA Tour from 125 to 100. Rex, you have been reporting on this issue for months. What was your main takeaway once it was finally unveiled to the members what they are proposing?

Well, it is dramatic. You're absolutely right. The majority of PGA Tour events, full field events would be reduced in size. And that goes all the way from, say, the Sony Open before daylight savings time. It looks like those events are going to be around 120, depending on golf course, time of year, that type of thing, to 144 in the middle of the summer. That's down from 156. So that makes sense. And we'll get into why the PGA Tour wants to do this. This has to do everything with taking a hard look at the product.

and trying to present the best possible product. And I was taken by one line. You pointed out it was 24 pages. 17 of those pages were dedicated to this. But one line out of those 17 pages that stood out was, quote, ideal field sizes. And the idea is you want to create the best possible experience, not just for the fan, but for the members as well, for the television product, for the corporate partners, everyone involved. So if you're going to do this, if less is more, and that seems to be the consensus among the

members on the pack, then you're going to lose playing opportunities. And that seems to be the bigger takeaway in my mind. So you're going to adjust field sizes because you feel like it's better for the product and we can get into if that's actually going to be the fact or not. But you're talking about 20 to 25% fewer memberships on the PGA tour. If you look right now, there's 208,

full members on the PGA Tour. That's going to go down to about 160. That's a really significant number. And there's going to be conversations among those guys that need to take a hard look at themselves in the mirror and realize that, yeah, I was closer to 208 than I am 160. And it's going to be tough for those players because you never want to be told that, yeah, this isn't for you anymore. But

If you look at what the tour was trying to do, and I see it from 30,000 feet. And I said this last night on golf central, that if you and I were having this conversation five years ago, I would be talking about a player revolt. There's no way the rank and file would have stood for this. I got to,

Two calls last night from players from five, six, seven, 10 years ago, Chip Eisenhower being one of them. He would have been one of the middle of the pack players who was losing his mind. But in this day and age, in 2024, with everything that's transpired over the last three years, nearly every player, active player I talked to yesterday about this move was in support of it. Some of them even said it's kind of long overdue, should have done this a long time ago. But that being said, it

The devil's in the details now. Now we need to see exactly how this is going to impact players. And to be clear, I think when you zoom out, I mean, 160-ish PGA Tour cards is still a boatload. You look at the field sizes. Full PGA Tour cards. There will still be players with conditional status beyond that.

That is still a ton. When you look at field sizes, trimming from 156, whether it's going to be 120, 132, 144, yes, I could see outrage. I could see an uproar if everything was going to look like that signature event model where all of a sudden you just have a 70-man event.

or 72-man PGA Tour, who's playing the exact same tournaments over and over again. Yes, that would be a close shot. Yes, I think that would be reason to really nitpick here. 120, 132, 144-man field still allow...

what the PGA tour is largely trying to do. That is to offer diversity each and every week in the PGA tour and allow sort of a breeding ground for new stars to emerge. That can still happen with fields that are of that size. And so obviously this is not going to be something that every PGA tour member agrees upon, but,

Big picture, this is the right move. And shockingly, I agree with many of the proposals that were put forth in this document. Like it is, we're cutthroat.

It's more competitive. It's less unwieldy. It's easier to understand. It's a streamlined version of a PGA Tour while still being the strongest and deepest tour in the world. And you mentioned telling guys in that 170 to 210 card-carrying range, yes, these are players who are at the peak and the pinnacle of their profession. And you're essentially telling them,

That they're not good enough. And that's got to be very, very hard to do because they've worked their entire careers to get this point. You're essentially telling them to go away. But if those players remove themselves from the situation and look at this objectively and the state of the PGA Tour being up against this existential crisis,

with live golf a whittling down is necessary for the strength and watchability of the pg tour it's not overall it's not an overhaul of the pg tour i think that could still and probably should happen

with schedules and what the tour can look like and where it goes and sort of an evolution of the Signature Event Series model. This, I think, is, for lack of a better phrase, trimming some of the fat or cutting some of the bloat on the PGA Tour. I don't think in five or ten years we'll look back at this and say that

something has changed demonstrably and the PGA Tour is worse off. Jim Gallagher and Trip Eisenhower would like a word when you talk about this isn't going to change. And this goes to what we've sort of batted back and forth. This is what we do in the pod now when we run out of things to talk about. We do the whiteboarding thing where you and I sit down and we come up with what would be the best case scenario for a PGA Tour schedule that would be 20 to 30 events, however you want to space those out. This is...

In actuality, the beginning of that, if you want to start, let's start with the idea that 156 players at the RBC Canadian Open is just too many players. And look, Twitter had fun yesterday. Sorry, X had fun yesterday because they immediately circled this back saying that, oh, instead of doing something serious about pace of play, this is going to be the tour's answer. And to a certain degree, that's not true. Sorry for the double negative, but

The idea that 156 players on one golf course are somehow going to play fast, regardless of the pace of play policy, regardless of how much the tour finds them for bad times. It's not going to happen. It's simple math. I've had Mark Russell, who's a friend of the pod and, and little rush shout out. I've had him explain this to me countless times.

about if you have 156 players and you have X amount of daylight and you're teeing players off the first and the 10th tee, that you're always going to run into a wall. They're always going to be five, five and a half, even six hour rounds. There's just nothing you can do about it when you're playing in threesomes. So this is the beginning of that pie in the sky conversation about what would be the best possible scenario for, and I love taking the Sony open because it's a great golf course.

You have limited daylight. It's in a really, really cool market. You're playing in primetime on the East Coast. How would you present that product in the best possible way? I think this is a step in that direction.

I would agree with you, too. And obviously there's there's mathematical reasons for the tours, tours run model. They've looked at the data. They understand what the optimal flow for a PGA Tour round is going to be. I look at this anecdotally and you and I have both gone to many golf tournaments this year and with with friends or family or people who come up to us and they're looking at the T-sheet.

of 156 or 144-man field, and they're scanning it. And sometimes the response is, who are these guys? And so getting down to 120, 132, I think is a move to strengthen the overall product of the PG Tour. What, Rex, do you think are some of the ramifications of

of this move as we now look into it a little bit deeper, whether it ranges from, you know, the guys who are now going to be conditionally exempt on the PG tour, that one-on-one to one 25 range or the signature events. Like where did your mind go when you started to dig into the details a little bit more? Yeah.

It's always going to be the unintended consequences. And I don't believe for a second that this was some sort of public move by the PGA tour to get this out in front of the public. I don't think that they're there yet. I don't think they were worried about the public at all. This was about getting it in front of the members and giving the members a month, a solid month before we get to the RSM Classic, which is where the final policy board meeting of the year will be held. It's where the policy board will vote on this particular measure. It's giving the membership.

an opportunity to read it and fully understand what the tour is going to do and let them reach out to their player directors and let them do their jobs and decide, okay, this is what we want to do. This is very much a trial balloon. Let's send it up and see what the unintended consequences are because I believe that...

what the tour has done, what the PAC has done, what the policy board has done is put a lot of work and a lot of effort into it, but it's certainly going to have an impact. And I asked you this yesterday on the round table that we had a three person round table. Is that a round table? Or is that just sitting at a bar? Yeah, I think that's just sitting at a bar. I actually think it was better. There's less confusion. What do you want to get rid of? Who are we getting rid of? Me, me, my God, me.

The roundtable would be so much better if I was not a part of it. No, no. I thought the roundtable went well. We're not getting rid of Damon. He was the one who had the test out yesterday. He's sick. I hope he's feeling better. But yeah, get rid of you or I. That's probably the better option. But we touched on this yesterday, and you follow this really well when it comes to PGA TOUR U. And how is this going to impact those players? We just had a conversation on Monday.

on Monday's round table on golf today about should they expand PGA tour? You, I think is what Eamon asked you. And the idea is yes, we've seen firsthand, secondhand, thirdhand this year, how players coming directly out of college, Nick Dunlap, others have been able to hit the PGA tour and start sprinting immediately.

And so I think that is going to be part of the unintended consequences because you're going to narrow that playing field. However, the opposite side of this conversation is what you just touched on. One of the reasons to do this beyond pace of play, beyond making a better product is if you have a PGA Tour card under this plan, if it's approved, you have a PGA Tour card.

Players in the past have complained to me and you that, oh, I have a PGA Tour card like this year, which means that he was on the back end of the Korn Ferry Tour class. Or now that they've gotten Q School back, they're on the back end of the Q School class, whatever the case may be. And you're scrambling to get into events. By the time we get to Augusta,

These players have probably played four times, five times if they're lucky, because you're not going to get into much on the West Coast. You're probably playing opposite field events for dramatically fewer points than what other players are playing in full field and certainly signature events. It puts these players behind the eight ball right to start. So in theory, you're giving them a boost up. But I can see how this system and this is meritocracy at its best. But at some point it becomes draconian. At some point it starts to weed out more than the chaff.

I think that's certainly possible. I mean, some would say that I cover PGA tour. You, as you mentioned Tuesday on golf today, more extensive than anyone, which I would probably better than anyone back a little bit on. I think you make a, you make a great point because when you look at the PGA tour university, which if you are unfamiliar with that program is for graduating seniors in college, rewarding performance over a two year cycle, you get either the number one guy gets PGA tour status, uh,

two through 10, get on the corn fairy tour. And after that, it's like PG tour Americas. And you're sort of working up the various pathways to the PG tour at that point. And so if your main funneling of these top college players is through the corn fairy tour, and now on paper, uh,

You are making that pathway a little bit tougher to get by with reducing of the corn fairy tour cards from 30 to 20. Yeah, that's probably going to be eye opening for those players. But I think you make a great point. And it's one that I tried to express on on Tuesday that these players now have a better shot.

Once they get on the court on the PGA tour to keep their status, you do have fewer exempt members. You do have smaller field sizes. You should have more starts as opposed to getting crunched in that late winter, late winter, early spring. And then all of a sudden you're playing eight, nine, 10 events in a row in the summer to accrue as many FedExCup points as possible. There is certainly going to be a,

A certainty of schedule that did not exist for PGA Tour players in the past, I think, is an overall positive thing. What do you think, Rex, of the reduction in membership to 100? Because to me, that makes it more competitive, sort of like an iron sharpening iron thing.

type of situation. To me, it's hard to justify a player retaining their playing privileges with a resume in which you're not competitive or a factor in 85% of the tournaments you're playing, right? So you look at the players right now who would be on that theoretical bubble of the top 100. On average, those players have three top 10s in 27 PGA Tour starts. In other words, they were not a factor

In 85% of the tournaments in which they're playing to me, I'm okay with having year to year consequence to having, you know, you have to, you have to, you have to put up or shut up. You know, if, if, if you don't play well enough in 2025, you're,

Sorry, you have to go somewhere else in 2026. That's what the PGA Tour struggled with for so long because of the exempt status. That's what Live Golf is struggling with now with relegation and some of their contracts where a player may, like Bubba Watson, may be relegated because of how poorly he's played. But, oh, he's a captain. We want to bring him back for reasons other than performance. Like, that's the stuff that needs to be eliminated now.

Having true relegation, having true promotion, which I believe this is now going to be with the Corn Fairy Tour and making it slightly easier for those guys to keep their status if they play well. Like that's what we need more of and less of these other pathways to just sort of be strung along for 15 to 18 events.

Along with that memo came the new chart of what they call what is the priority rankings. And this is a really, really boring, nerdy thing to dig into, but I've done it for my entire career. So currently, I think there's 39 categories in this. And essentially...

lays out how fields are filled. And it starts with number one is anyone who's won a major the last five years. And number two is anyone who's won a PGA Tour event the last two years. And number three, on and on and on. And I tend to agree with you to a certain extent. I will push back a little bit and say I think the tour has always had a great amount of meritocracy.

that yes, there is relegation on and off every single year. We see it every year when it comes to the playoffs. We see it every year on the corn fairy tour. We've seen it the last few years, but even conditional status guys are getting 12 to 15 starts Rex. That's too much. And there's too many. My point is the priority rankers or rankings are just riddled with small print. And that's sort of the by-product of, if you're going to put players on the policy board and they're going to make the policy, they're going to look out for themselves eventually. And so this is decades and decades of,

a player sitting on the policy board deciding that, huh, I'm going to need some sort of exemption in three years because I'm going to be 47 years old and I'm not playing well enough to stay inside the top 125. It's just a number is what hits me. So you're throwing out the top 100 like it's some sort of magical elixir that, oh yeah, this is a perfect number. This is just a number. There's

There's no reason to say that this is the perfect number, the right number or the wrong number. And my guess is it will continue to be adjusted over the years because I had this conversation with a player a few weeks ago after the Wyndham Championship. And this player had finished somewhere between 100 and 125 on the points list in the regular season, which meant that they didn't get the playoffs. But technically, they still kept their job. And the player's complaint was this has been the worst year of my career.

And we were on the phone and I start scrolling through the stats. Like now I'm curious. And I had to tell them that, no, this is actually the sixth best out of 16 seasons, statistically, of your career. What you're mad about is they moved the goalpost. And so now 125 is not the magical number. Now you need to get into the top 70 and your mind is the magical number. All the tour is done.

Sort of move that goalpost again. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Again, I keep going back to if you're going to bring private equity in, which the tour has done, you need to start producing results above and beyond what we've seen over the last lifetime of professional golf. That means making the product better. That means bringing new fans to the game. That means creating a new environment.

immediate platform that will allow the public to digest this and enjoy this in a different way. And I think this is a step in the right direction, but I don't particularly think 100 is necessarily better from a meritocracy standpoint than 125 for some reason. No, but you should just always want to your point. You should always want players to be motivated to improve.

And shifting the goalposts to make it tougher to keep your card and to keep your job year over year, I think is a positive step. The last thing you want is sort of that range to get complacent.

And if you know that, oh, you know, as long as I finish the top 10 three or four times this year, I can do whatever I want in the other tournaments. I'm still going to be safe. That's exactly what you want to avoid in this situation. You want to make it so those guys are continually improving, continually striding for upward mobility. There were a couple other things, Rex, I don't want to spend much time on, but I do want to point out in this podcast, because I think they'll be sneaky important. The first one is, and we actually talked about this when the signature event model first came out.

But there's going to be a small reduction in FedExCup points in sort of that middle range of signature events. They're reducing the number of FedExCup points for finishes that are worse than sixth. To me, that's very important because only two players this past season on the PGA Tour cracked the top 50 in FedExCup points without playing a signature event. That was Max Gracerman and

and Aaron Rye, who ended up winning the final regular season tournament of the year at the Wyndham Championship. This was one of the main perception issues when they sort of unveiled this series, is that, oh, this is going to be a closed shop, and these players who get into the signature events are going to be sort of insulated from poor play, where you can finish in the middle of the pack in signature events, but still earn more than, say, an eighth-place finish in a full-field event. So I think this is going to be a good move

for the pg tour and make it more equitable in the middle where you're not necessarily rewarding players for uh average performance in elevated events i thought that was important to point out because that was something that we had touched on in the past how about rex the uh reduction if not outright elimination of monday qualifying spots some of the romanticism

has probably been lost on the PGA Tour. What do you think of the move to do so?

I think in that memo, there is actually a reference to this where they're talking about reducing the number of open qualifying spots into events. And it pointed out, I think it's somewhere between 68 and 70 percent of Monday qualifiers don't make the cut. And that's actually a very, very large sample size when you consider that every open field event has at least four open qualifiers. Some even have more than that. So I just don't think you see the production from that level necessarily.

I would push back a little bit on this one only because it wasn't that long ago when Patrick Reed sort of made his way up via Monday qualifying. If you look at what he was able to do early in his career. But I don't think that pathway is viable anymore. We've seen it in the past. You and I have certainly seen it over the course of...

of our careers. But now I think there's other avenues. If you're a young and up and coming player, you talked about PGA tour. You certainly what the DP world tour and the PGA tour have done with the top 10 off their points list at the end of every season has created a pathway. We've always had the corn fairy tour. I just don't think that,

one Monday, which is always a sprint. You just need to go out and make as many birdies as you possibly can is a good indicator of possible success on the PGA Tour. So I personally don't have a problem with that one. I was reading some on the internet yesterday that we have colleagues that certainly don't like that part of it.

Yeah, I can certainly agree with that. Ryan French, MondayQInfo, is a friend of ours. I'm sure he is not overly enthused with the direction that PGA Tour is heading here. I made the point, like, they're trying to identify stars, not necessarily stars.

players who have sort of one week story shelf lives. And, and so that's, that's just, if, if you're getting 65 to 70% of those players missing the cut, there's just not a log, like a long-term viability for those players. And I would look at even Q school and sort of the same vein. I'm surprised they're sticking with five players, uh,

Getting through Q School to be fully exempt members on the PGA Tour, that still seems like too many. You look at the five players who got through this past year, and that was the first time in almost a decade, right, since Q School was going to be awarding outright PGA Tour cards. Only one player this year is even remotely close to keeping his tour card for 2025. That's Hayden Springer, and he's right now, I believe, 123rd.

In the FedEx Cup race. And actually they reduced the Q school number. Technically, it's kind of a it's top five. Now it was top five and ties. OK, but but but five still seems like a lot. Like if you're the PGA Tour, you want to look at the largest sample size and try and get the highest retention rates.

That's why you're giving these players a full season on the PGA Tour. That's why you're giving them a full season on the Corn Fairy Tour. That's why you're giving them two years in college golf with PGA Tour university rankings. So you have that larger sample size. Monday Q, not a large sample size. A Q school one week getting hot.

at the TPC dive Valley course in Ponte Vedra. That is not a large sample size as well. The DP world tour giving 10 cards over the course of the entire season. Yeah. I believe that's a more positive direction as opposed to sort of these, these one-offs in which you can get hot and change your, change your life that way.

Now, and I am going to cry foul a little bit on parts of this proposal. And this is kind of part of it because the idea, and I tend to agree with you, it is not a good indicator of long-term success on the PGA Tour. You're talking about a Monday sprint, as many birdies as you possibly can. However, part of this, as we've pointed out, is to improve the product. Part of this is to improve the storytelling. And so if you look at how many times the cut isn't made on Friday afternoon, you can't really do much storytelling if you're actually not going to make the cut till Saturday morning.

So this is part of the motivation to reduce field sizes to make sure that you have the cut on Friday afternoon because you want to tell those stories of Ryan Labner trying to make the cut for the first time all season long on a Friday afternoon and not wait until Saturday morning.

part of those stories, and this is not the best comparison, but you get the idea. Michael Block was the story of the PGA Championship a few years ago, and he essentially was a Monday qualifier. That's not fair because you have to play well in the PGA of America's Championship. To get into it, it's a much more elaborate thing than just a one-day tournament, but he was the sweetheart of golf, professional golf, for a number of weeks. That 15 minutes of fame lasted a long time. You're not necessarily going to have that now. It

It's not as though we have that a lot in golf, but this pretty much takes that away. And I think that might be something that they need to look at. You do want the Cinderella stories. The other half of this is, and there was, I was told by some members of the pack that as they sort of came up with this concept and players began to embrace the idea of reducing field sizes for the good of the product, there was some back and forth about, okay, if we reduce full field sizes at the Sony Open, for example,

Can you meet us halfway and add players to the field in the signature events and trying to do some sort of trade-off? The tour, I was told, felt like this was a non-starter. In the memo, they actually referenced the idea that it would be, quote-unquote, too confusing for the fans. Fan confusion. Fan confusion at this point. Because I need you to meet me on camera too, fan. And this is the way it's going to be. This is complicated. So please, please, please pay attention. We now have 72 minimum player fields at the signature events. We're going to move that to 82. Okay.

At this point, it would be, quote, disruptive and create fan confusion. Keep in mind, all of these proposals, if approved by the policy board mid-November, would not take effect until 2026. And so fans who are confused by the shifting field size for signature events would have 14 months to wrap their heads around

Those changing field sizes, that will not go. I would push back on that idea, Rex, of expanding the field size. And look, I'm not a huge fan of that. I'm not sure 72 is the right number. I'm not sure 100 is the right number. I haven't dug that deep into it. But you do need to differentiate, right?

the premier events on the PGA tour from the full events on the PGA tour. I do think that is a good direction for the PGA tour. If all of a sudden you're reducing field sizes from full field events, but increasing field size for signature events, all of a sudden you're back in the same place.

Where these, you know, the feel of the Arnold Palmer Invitational looks a whole lot like the field at the American Express. That's exactly what they're trying to get away from. They're trying to tell the PGA Tour fan, hey, these are the most important events. Pay attention to these. And you can't do it if all of a sudden it looks the exact same.

i just feel like whatever they wanted to do with the signature events and at first it was between 70 and 80 players now they've set the floor at heart 72 players because they had some fields that didn't fill out this year why

Again, this is just an imaginary number that you've come up with on a blackboard that you feel like you can point to and be like, yeah, 75. That seems like a good number to differentiate between a full field and a signature event. Why not 100 to 120 or 100 to 145, 44 or 100 to 132? Because it's all about the flow of a round. It's about it's about T times. And I knew you were going to say that, though, and we can always practice the best round viability.

We can always go to the best tournament of the year, almost like clockwork, is the Masters. And what's their field size on average year to year? Roughly 90 to 100. There you go. Augusta made my point for me. Thank you very much. Augusta's field obviously is watered down at the back end. And so really the more competitive players are what? 72, roughly?

But again, if 90 to 100 works in that particular championship, and I don't know why, in all the other majors, it's 156. But what the tour is saying that no, no, no, that that model doesn't work anymore. Those are broken. The biggest events in golf are somehow broken. We're going to make it better.

I mean, it's a fair point. Again, I'm not a huge proponent of 72. I don't know what the right number is. To me, that seems a little bit too low in the fact that you're just sort of picking up and it's basically a bloated version of live golf where you're seeing the same big name players competing in the biggest tournaments. That's exactly what you don't want to have. But I think that's Rex is a good transition to what the PGA Tour could then become.

In the fall, we know what the regular season is. I think you and I are both a fan of the move back to a January to August. We saw that the FedEx Cup playoffs concluding right around Labor Day. It has since been sort of a hodgepodge of tournaments. We've had a couple off weeks such as this one. You had a team event in the President's Cup that sort of interrupted the fall slate as well. When you zoom out, and this is a good opportunity to do so because we have now three events left.

And the FedEx Cup fall is like we're basically halfway through it. Do you think it's working? And if not, what's wrong? I don't even know what it is anymore. Well, it's the FedEx Cup fall. Yes, it's very good packaging, very good marketing, but I'm not quite sure what they're trying to accomplish because now it feels like an eight-week Q school. And we had this conversation last week on golf today. As it applies to the Zozo Championship, you essentially –

took an eight-week playoff and made it seven weeks for some players and eight weeks for other players. So you've already sort of upset what you've sort of created. And that's not fair. The RSMs of the world and the Sanderson Farms and the Zozos don't want to be referred to as an eight-week playoff. But it's not even close to what it used to be. Just five years ago, there were 11 events

in the fall. And even though back then, I remember the conversation you and I were having was why, why wouldn't the tour just take an off season? Every other sport has a true off season. And my comeback was always patented. And I truly believed in it. And I still believe in it to the day, show me a business, a successful business that turns away customers. And that's essentially what you and others were arguing for at the time. Like, why would,

the PGA tour, turn away RSM and its money because no, no, no, no. We don't want to play golf in the fall. We want to give football fall to football and we want the fans to miss us. So on January 1st, when we show up in Maui for the century tournament of champions that it's been a couple of months, everyone wants to see us again. That argument doesn't float with me anymore because now you end up with a situation where you can go through the fall. I think by my count, I,

all but two of the title sponsors in the fall, eight title sponsors are up after next year. And so that means that there will be some tough decisions to be made. And you're talking about Sanderson farms, who was actually out this year and decided to re-up for one more year. You have Zozo, you have RSM, you have all of these big sponsors. You have Shriners who have been around for decades on the PGA tour, who are clearly looking at the product and trying to make the cost benefit analysis of, is this worth our dollars, our marketing costs?

I think the answer in some of those areas is going to be a very, very hard no. So what if the tour wants to do this reimagine the fall thing or not? I think it's going to be part of a bigger reimagination of the schedule. And I think what we'll end up with is less, is more certainly in the fall. I mean, it's a very tough sell. If you're the PG tour trying to pitch these to a sponsor in the fall, right? Like you're asking them to pony up for a weak field and,

at a time of year when very few people are watching. They're distracted by other things. Like you can't, if this is sort of be, what did Jay Monahan say? This is supposed to be the period of meaning and consequence, essentially elongated Q school. Q school is great because all of the pressure that they felt for an entire year is now condensed into four days. You either play well and advance your career or you don't and you're still stuck in the minor leagues. That's great.

You can't expand Q school to all of a sudden eight weeks. You can't say a four day tournament is consequential and meaningful and then balloon it out to eight tournaments like that defeats the purpose. We're not even going to get into the FedEx points being allocated for Zozo championship and a no cut event because that just does not that literally undermines the

the entire premise of this FedEx cup fall, which is either you play well, it advanced your career or you don't. And so if like the obvious move is to just scale back four seems like a good number. If not three, I believe the corn fairy tour playoffs is, is, is three events. Like you've given these guys all season long. Most of these, most of these players are, are logging anywhere. If you're in sort of this, this range, you're logging anywhere from 25 to 30 events,

Then you're adding another eight on top of that, like another quarter of the season. Like it's just there's too many lifelines. Again, it's making it more stringent if you're a PGA Tour player and making it more consequential how you're going to play for the year instead of just continually giving them lifelines. Scarcity is the direction the PGA Tour should be heading, and they just have never done it particularly well.

Well, and you also look at the end of next year or next year, I guess, next fall, those events will start having to pony up even more money. So it'll be $125,000 per tournament starting next year. And then after that, it goes up to a quarter of a million, $250,000. So this all goes into the budget line. Like at what point are the Shriners of the world, well, Shriners have already made the decision, or Sanderson Farms or Zozo or Procore or whoever else decide that- Butterfield. Butterfield.

Yeah, another good example. And look, maybe there is a scaled down version of this to your point. And maybe they do continue to play aid events. But you need to find some sort of identity because it's interesting to me that you went from the fall, which did not have an identity way back in the day when the season technically ended at Disney after the tour championship, which made no sense. And then through trial and error, you actually came up with a version

of the fall that did make some sort of sense on some level. Now it makes no sense at all. It doesn't make any sense at all. Again, I think like a three or four week playoff could actually be pretty interesting for those who did not quite cut it as essentially a FedExCup playoffs scenario.

just for those at the bottom of the FedEx cup rates. And so what's the solution here, Rex? If you're whiteboarding this thing out, you just, you just want to kill the fall. I know you, you just want to kill it. You want to get rid of it entirely. What sort of solutions do you have to this problem?

Well, and this goes to, I believe after next year, you're going to see a vastly different product on the PGA tour schedule period, just not the fall. I'm saying the entire, I think the entire schedule is under a microscope right now. And I don't think that's part of what could become of the negotiations between the PGA tour and the public investment fund. I think this is part of a bigger exercise that the tour is doing with private equity, again, trying to improve the product.

I don't know that I would sit here and say, yes, the fall needs to go away because you probably will still have sponsors, to my point, that want to sponsor events in the fall. You certainly will still have players who want to play in the fall, but you need to do a better job of identifying exactly what these players are doing. And you talk about going from a floor of 72 for the signature events to something else, 80 or 90 would be too confusing. If you want to start dismantling things that are confusing, dismantle whatever the fall is.

Because if you finish inside the top 70, you can still play in the fall, but it doesn't count to the points. But if you finished inside the top 100, you still have your card, but you can improve your status. You see where I'm going with this? It gets very, very complicated, and needlessly so. Just pull the slate clean and say, okay, if you want to play in the fall, this is what it means, and this is what you're playing for. Whether that's four events or seven events or eight, I'm not quite sure what the perfect formula is, but you need to be clear about what you're doing. Isn't this the perfect time, though,

Rex to experiment, to include different formats, make it fun.

Kind of alter the traditional tournament schedule. Maybe bring in some more DP World Tour events. This is an off week for the DP World Tour as well. Then you're going to have their quote-unquote playoffs with an event in Abu Dhabi in Dubai, which many of their top players are tuning up for. You could have team golf. You could have TGL. I know TGL is going to be in the early spring in 2025, but potentially in the future that could change as well. We didn't have a match play event.

on the PGA tour this year. We don't have a match play event on the PGA tour schedule in 2025. If you want this, if you, if you want stars to show up at least once in the fall, have a great match play event, have a one club tournament, have sort of a skins game. I wouldn't have, I certainly wouldn't have tournaments Thursday through Sunday when you know that attendance is going to be sparse because school's back in session.

And there's other things going on in the community. Fewer people are going to be watching golf on television with college football and the NFL dominating the airwaves. Like why don't have a Sunday through Wednesday or why don't have a Tuesday through Friday? Like they should get experimental. They should get, they should be more innovative in the fall instead of just trotting out the same old 72 hole tournaments, knowing that it's not particularly working and knowing that it's not particularly appealing and

to title sponsors as some of them start dropping out. Mark the 3951 minute because I'm going to say something here that's probably going to want to get cut. Give the fall to Liv Goff.

Like we've had this conversation for so long and imagine five years ago when live golf was still just on a whiteboard somewhere and someone was trying to figure it out. And well, how do we deal with the PGA tour? Well, we go to the PGA tour and we have a conversation and the conversation goes, no, we're not giving updates in the middle of our season and the summer. However, you can have the fall.

And whether if you want to play eight of your 14 events or 14 of your 14 events in the fall, that's up to you. I can imagine a scenario where you would play eight of 14 events. If there is some sort of deal between the public investment fund and somehow the tour and live golf need to come and play together in the same playpen, this would be it.

That's the way you would do it. And then at the end of the fall, to your point, make something fun, make something exciting, do a team match between the lib golf team that won and the best PGA tour team, whatever that is, whoever that might be. So there are ways you can make this fun. There are ways to work around it and make a landscape that may not resonate as much as the major championships or the players or the Ryder cup, but you create a different product. I keep going back to what the NBA did last season. And I was pretty blown away by the idea. If you sit and watch the,

the media landscape. It's not particularly easy for these leagues every three, four, five, six years, whatever the case may be, to go back to the TV partners and ask for more money. Well, that's what the NBA was going to do. And part of that magic trick that the NBA pulled off was they created an in-season tournament, which meant you took existing games. There were no more games added to the schedule, but you just turned them into the mid-season tournament.

And it was won by L.A., so that actually worked out well. But they were able to sell those games above and beyond what they would normally sell a regular season in the middle of the year tournament. To me, this is a good opportunity for golf to do the exact same thing, create a product out of thin air that isn't here right now. The biggest issue with that, though, Rex, is that the top players are telling us resoundingly, perhaps save for Roy McIlroy, that they don't want to play in the fall, that they're dog-tired.

Scotty Scheffler did not play at the tour championship until the president's cup. We will not see him again until the hero world challenge. Sanders Shoffley got off the couch after the president's cup to play the Zozo championship where he obviously has some family ties. We're not expected to see him for the rest of the year. Kyle Morikawa popped up last week. I expect to see him the rest of the year. Like these guys do not want to play. I get that. And, and, and may look, maybe you offer them such a substantial amount of money that

That, okay, I'm not going to prepare like I typically would for a signature event on the PGA Tour. But the money is so head-turning that I have no choice but to play. However, I still think some of these players are going to be like, nah, I'm good, fam. I was just grinding from January to August.

I want to have time off with my family. I don't want to travel. Like I want to do my own thing. I think they're going to face some, some headwinds in that respect of, of making it appealing enough. Like Scotty, what did he just make? $40 million on the PGA tour. You offer him, Hey, Scotty need you for $5 million to play this, this live golf series in the fall. I'm good.

No, thanks. I'm just going to hang out with Meredith and Bennett. Like, I'm good. But all of a sudden, your product is weakened if you don't have Scottie Scheffler. Like, you have to have buy-in from the top players. And those top players, again, save for Rory, who's played a ton this fall and is going to be playing in the Middle East in a couple weeks' time here. Like, they just don't want to play in the fall. That was supposed to be the benefit of going to this –

January to August schedule. And I'm totally fine with that. And this goes to, this is a broader conversation that I don't want to start at the 40 minute mark. However,

You have live players, and I know this seems to be where everyone is getting caught up in the negotiations. Where are the players who join live golf? I don't think they're going to want to come back and play a regular PGA Tour schedule. I don't think they have a whole lot of interest in adding 20 events to their 14-event schedule. So you're going to have to find a way to meet them somewhere in the middle. If there is going to be a deal, and I'm not saying there is or there isn't going to be a deal. I honestly don't know. I think there's only a handful of people who might have a clue on that one.

I don't think those players are going to want to come back. So to your point, you would have five, six regular, I mean, live events during the course of the summer and then play the rest of the schedule out in the fall. And then at the end of that, you have some sort of team event. Then you include PGA Tour players. And you're right. Scotty Scheffler is probably not going to want to play it. But if he doesn't, that's fine. That could be a next man up kind of thing. That's fun. That's what you talked about. That's what you want. Do that Monday through Thursday. Like there's a bunch of ways you can do this.

I want fun. I want one club tournaments. I want skills competitions. One club tournaments. I want mixed team events. This is an opportunity when you know people are not necessarily tuning in to just do something different, do something fun. We just had an entire year of monotonous 72-hole tournaments of varying significance and meaning. I think this is a great opportunity to think outside the box and to really bring something new

that could be impactful and sort of resonate with fans. And look, this is not our cup of tea because you and I are both not influencers. Like the Creator Classic,

was a great example of that, of bringing in YouTube stars the Wednesday of the Tour Championship. Have that as a standalone event in the fall with a couple of players who are like guest commentators. I think there's just so much opportunity, and I'm optimistic with the infusion of the SSG folks who know how to monetize sports products that the PG Tour eventually opens

could get into a place that's a very, very cool product. And I think you're conveniently overlooking the fact that there is some fun events in Nepal. The Grant Thornton, which is a team event that's both men and women. I think that's a fun event. I enjoy watching that. You have the match coming up, which will include two players from Live and two players from the PGA Tour in Vegas. More. Give us more of that. Give us more than that. You have TGL, which is going to be in the spring. I think you had a meeting with them the other day. Did you have a meeting with them? Did anything come up in that meeting?

Oh, we did. Yeah, we did have a meeting. Very insightful. Yeah. Appreciate anything specific. No. Okay. Nothing. Nothing really came up. Cool. I do appreciate you mentioning that this, this might Rex be the longest podcast ever

in the fall in history. This is longer than our president's cup recap. This was longer than our president's cup preview in which we were sort of perseverating over some of the possible pairings and how the course was going to play a kudos to you. Kudos to me.

We have made in what is our like our 10th year of doing this podcast, some golf channel podcast with Rex and lab history going so deep on this one. We have plenty more up on the website. You guys are the drill NBC sports.com slash golf, plenty of reaction. We have commentary, plenty of videos from recognized respective appearances on golf today, this week.

He and I will be back next week for a full preview of the week's events and what else to look for in the fall. Thanks for listening. Thanks for the support. Have a great rest of your week and happy Halloween.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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