Brian Rolapp Strikes All the Right Chords in Multi-Themed Competitive Structure

The opening shot of this year’s Players Championship won’t be struck until Thursday morning, but we might’ve already witnessed the best performance of the week.

In his first State of the Tour address, so to speak, at the league’s flagship event, PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp stepped to the proverbial tee and started firing shots that landed in a mutually beneficial area to appease both players and fans moving forward.

Just nine months into the job, there was skepticism that Rolapp was intent on the Tour becoming a “closed shop,” his prior comments on “scarcity” leading many to believe the schedule would subsist of fewer tournaments featuring fewer players, potentially even mirroring the format of rival league LIV Golf.

Instead, his six-pronged proposal of themes for a new competitive structure took on a contrasting tone, one that suggests more tournaments with star-studded fields and more ways for other players to receive promotion.

Let’s go through ‘em, one by one:

“We are looking at roughly 21 to 26 tournaments on a first track of elevated events with the best players competing for higher purses.”

This includes the four major championships and The Players – which, oh by the way, apparently won’t receive major status anytime soon, considering Rolapp admitted, “That’s not for us to decide” – meaning a full season of high-level weekly events featuring the game’s best players.

An announcement such as this without any qualifiers might seem too insular, creating a rich-get-richer, LIV-like league that feels more like the Ice Capades, with tournaments taking on a traveling circus theme rather than offering competition as the main drawing card.

All of which explains why he quickly moved to his next point…

“Ideally, we are targeting something closer to 120-player fields with a cut.”

Hallelujah. If we’re seeking a specific idea with Tiger Woods’ fingerprints all over it, then it might very well be this one, as Woods – like so many players – favors a system which offers more playing opportunities and doesn’t give any free passes into the weekend.

This notion is so important to what Rolapp termed the “meritocracy” of the PGA Tour. Giving the best players free money and points and other assets simply because of who they are spits in the face of the pay-for-play structure that professional golf has always been based upon.

“We want to open big with a marquee event at an iconic venue in the west.”

Prime-time golf in much of the country? On a weekend with no football? With all of the best players?

Yes, yes and yes. Whether this means Pebble Beach or Torrey Pines or maybe even the spectacle of TPC Scottsdale one week earlier, the idea of starting the season less with a soft launch and more like NASCAR, which opens with the Daytona 500, on the weekend between the NFL’s conference championship games and the Super Bowl seems like a terrific thought on paper, even if it does rob us of two fun weeks in Hawaii when so many watching on television are suffering FOMO.

“We are evaluating markets … where there is a strong fan demand for our sport, and a chance to reach new fans.”

Rolapp specifically mentioned “markets like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston, and many others,” which makes sense on a macro level.

In theory, the biggest markets should have big-time events.

That said, I’m not sure it always works that way – and it might be something that works or doesn’t work on a case-by-case basis. Not everyone in Boston will be excited that a PGA Tour event is in their city (especially if, as used to be the case, it wasn’t actually anywhere near the city), but you’ll never find a single person in Silvis, Ill., who isn’t aware when the John Deere Classic is in town. It might be a matter of trial-and-error which suggests Chicago and Philadelphia crave these events while New York and D.C. don’t move the needle.

“We are evaluating the role of promotion and relegation between these two tracks within our competitive model.”

Not unlike the English Premier League – which Rolapp referenced during this discussion – there’s a belief that the PGA Tour could essentially be two separate leagues, with the ability for any player to move up or down based on his performance.

There remain plenty of questions here. Would these events run concurrently throughout the entire season? How exactly would promotion occur? What would this do to/for the Korn Ferry Tour?

Those are all valid queries, but the idea plays into the meritocracy which he spoke about. Simply offering an entrance to that top track should be enough to placate both players and fans.

“We are exploring ways to enhance the post-season … bringing win-or-go-home moments to the conclusion of our season.”

In particular, it sounds like match play is coming to the FedEx Cup playoffs, either for the entirety of them or just for the Tour Championship finale.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of this idea, as match play always feels like golf’s answer to journalism’s inverted pyramid, meaning the most informative/entertaining stuff happens at the beginning and becomes progressively less interesting as it continues.

That said, I’ll readily admit that I’m in the minority here. The current model hasn’t really worked, so let’s try something different and see if the PGA Tour can own the late-summer sporting landscape in the weeks before football season begins.

If nothing else, it’s another sign that the PGA Tour is moving in the right direction. There remains plenty of small stuff that will undoubtedly be sweated, but the major themes accomplish what’s become the biggest problem in the past – trying to serve so many masters, including the membership itself, sponsors, media partners and, of course, the fans.

Too often it’s been that final group which has been left out of the equation, but if fans want one singular reason to applaud the big-picture theme from Rolapp’s press conference, it should come from these words: “The sports business is not that hard. Just think like a fan and 9.5 times out of 10 that’s the right answer.”