As Jay Monahan shook hands with Brian Rolapp, welcomed him to the podium and stepped off the stage, it felt like a meaningful transition for the future of professional golf.The contrast was obvious. It was even sartorial: Monahan in a structured blue blazer handing off to Rolapp in a more casual light gray, the low-handicap golf lifer handing off to the man who barely plays, the longtime commissioner forged in the fires of the PGA Tour handing off to the longtime NFL executive, a literal and figurative move towards something new.Rolapp has only been in the job a few weeks, so it’s far too early to judge any type of performance. It might be silly to read into an introductory press conference at all. But if Step 1 is talking a good game and Step 2 is making it happen, Rolapp seems to at least have the first part down. The word “impressive” is used a lot when people are asked about him, from players to media members to Tour staffers. And on Wednesday at the Tour Championship, in his first in-depth public appearance, three moments showed why.
Was this written by an actual journalist, or rather the Tour's PR department.... But I've been watching commissioners since Nurse Ratched show an aggressive disregard for nature of our game (just look at the history of this week's event), so what could go wrong with a guy that doesn't even play?
Dylan Dethier informs us that we should be impressed for at least three reasons, so prepare to be blown away:
1. “The goal is significant change.”Rolapp stressed several times that he has been encouraged by the state of the PGA Tour that he’s inheriting. He cited a “strong roster” of partners. The sport is growing and the business is growing with it. He actually said twice that “the strength of the Tour is strong” and it’s a credit to his delivery that it almost seemed to make sense when he did.But his emphasis was on change. He recycled a phrase from his initial letter: We’re going to honor tradition, but we will not be overly bound by it. And he declared that one of his first acts as CEO is to create the “Future Competition Committee” aimed at revisiting the Tour’s competitive model.“The purpose of this committee is pretty simple: We’re going to design the best professional golf competitive model in the world for the benefit of PGA Tour fans, players and their partners,” Rolapp said. “It is aimed at a holistic relook of how we compete on the Tour. That is inclusive of regular season, postseason and off-season.”And then he doubled down on that idea of a holistic relook.
"The strength of the tour is strong", eh? Did he write that himself or were ghostwriters employed?
Who doesn't crave the odd holistic relook, is it truly necessary with the Tour's strength being so..., what's that word again, strong?
Would it be wrong of me to note that the subject of his "relook" has just been restructured by the best minds in sports to capture all holistic requirements... So, Brian seems to be saying that those best minds are, well, hackers (and would someone please explain that term to the new Commish).
And Rollap is quite unhappy with that prior work it seems:
“The goal is not incremental change,” he said. “The goal is significant change.”Feel free to believe it when you see it, of course. This is not a league known for its dynamic decision-making, and while this committee will have golf gravitas — Tiger Woods is serving as chair — it’s largely made up of establishment figures that have served on other Tour boards and committees like Adam Scott, Patrick Cantlay, Maverick McNealy, John Henry and Joe Gorder. The addition of baseball’s reimagination wizard Theo Epstein is intriguing, as is the committee’s entire directive. But it’s also fair to hold a little skepticism that real change starts with the formation of another committee.
Well, you knew Cantlay, the Terrific Penis, would be at the table. I hate to sound cynical, but the very guys that just restructured the Tour to grab more of its riches will still be in charge.... what could possibly go wrong?
Dylan's sycophancy is more than a bit off-putting, as you'll quickly discern from this seminal exchange:
2. “The sports business is not that complicated”What draws people to Rolapp is not that he’s particularly dynamic but instead that he makes complex stuff sound simple. I asked him whether there have been any jarring changes coming from the NFL and its kajillion-dollar business to the PGA Tour, which is a decidedly different sport and, I would think, a completely different business. He more or less shrugged.“It’s a lot hotter in Ponte Vedra than it is in Manhattan this time of year,” he said.
Not sure I'm equipped to keep up with the 3D chess he's playing there....
To the extent that there was any actual substance, this was it:
Rolapp outlined three pillars the Tour wants to double down on: further committing to a meritocratic structure (he called this parity), making it feel special when the Tour’s best players come together (this was “scarcity”) and doing a better job of connecting the regular season and the postseason to elevate the entire product (he called this “simplicity”).
Well, Brian, that Cantlay guy will be all in on meritocracy, as long as the riffraff are kept far away from those huge money grabs....
He does seem to be doubling down on those tiny-field money grabs, but he would have the job is he didn't More substantively, those two concepts are diametrically opposed, and I don't suspect the Tour rabbit community to be encouraged by anything they heard this week.
This second item is interesting as well:
The new PGA Tour CEO knows you won’t read this
The passive-aggressive header is a reference to this:
“Anybody who’s in the sports business, their general competition is for the mind share of sports fans and for their time,” Rolapp said. “[Sports leagues want to capture attention] in a complicated world that is increasingly disrupted by technology, where you have a million things to do with your time, a million alternatives.”Rolapp was responding to a question from Yahoo‘s Jay Busbee about comments made by his old boss, Roger Goodell, who reportedly said the NFL’s primary competition was not the NBA or MLB but “Apple and Google.”
Hmmmm. Is that why the Tour is wrapping the week before Labor Day? Because Google and Apple kick off in September? Here's some additional drivel:
“You just have to constantly innovate,” Rolapp said, hinting at an appetite for change that could come to define his tenure. “I think if there’s anything I learned at the NFL, it’s that we did not sit still. We changed rules every March. We changed the kickoff rule. That’s what I mean by honoring tradition but not being bound by it. I think that level of innovation is what we’re going to do here, and I think that’s one lesson I’ve learned.”
Innovation. Interest. Intrigue. The lesson here is that it’s all related because it’s all drawing attention.
“Look, the sports business is not that complicated,” Rolapp said. “You get the product right, you get the right partners, your fans will reward you with their time because they’re telling you it’s good and they want more of it, and then the commercial and the business part will take care of itself.”
In all, the message seems clear: With Rolapp at the helm, there are few sacred cows at the PGA Tour.
There may be few, but I do notice that each and every sacred cow seems to have a seat on the committee....
Eamon Lynch has his characteristically incendiary thoughts on this subject:
Lynch: New CEO Brian Rolapp just ended the PGA Tour as we know it, even if he didn’t say it out loud
The man writes the best ledes in the business, even if they're not exactly realized in the piece.
As the owner of more than 180 patents, inventor and businessman Charles Kettering knew ofwhat he spoke when he said the best way to kill an idea is to get a committee working on it. Yet collective panels often serve a purpose for those who convene them, as evidenced by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which exists to provide air cover for what a powerful chief executive has already decided will happen. The CCP has 205 members, and 204 of those votes don’t outweigh the one of Xi Jinping.On Wednesday, the PGA Tour’s new CEO, Brian Rolapp, announced the creation of the Future Competition Committee, which is charged with aggressively re-examining the Tour’s entire business model. It could be airily dismissed as a talking shop, an exercise in keeping minutes while losing months, but Rolapp’s star chamber has the potential to author — or at least sign off on — the most seismic shake-up in the organization’s history.
Whiplash alert, after likening him to Xi, he then undermines that assertion of control with this:
In some respects, Rolapp will have less executive authority at the Tour than existed in his past gig. The veteran NFL executive spent over 20 years in a sport with one authority, with players who are contracted, where fans and broadcasters know who’s playing each week, and where his outfit owned the biggest event. Now he’s in a sport with multiple bodies running things, with talent that isn’t contracted, in which fans and broadcasters have no guarantee who will play, and where — despite being arguably the most influential entity in golf — he controls none of the game’s five biggest events.
Tackling that inequity head-on is a fool’s errand. Players will not consent to being contracted, and even armed with a billion-five from Strategic Sports Group, he’d struggle to acquire the PGA Championship or Ryder Cup, given how many PGA of America snouts would need to be dislodged from the trough. So other than creaming off a percentage of the revenue generated by the majors — and make no mistake, the Tour is coming for its share of that — the best he can do is streamline and elevate his own product.
So, where are we going with all this, Eamon?
What does that look like?In both public comments and meetings with staff, Rolapp has said that every successful sports league requires three things, and that the PGA Tour currently only has one of them. That’s competitive parity, notwithstanding Scottie Scheffler performing on a different plane than his contemporaries. The two elements he believes are lacking are simplicity and scarcity.
That Scheffler bit seems odd, as the biggest issue with golf is the excessive level of parity, to wit, that the best players win so infrequently. Let's let Eamon continue:
The Tour doesn’t have simplicity in any realm. Not in the structure of its season-long points race, not in the format of its playoffs, not in the eligibility criteria for issuing cards and filling fields. Until a change was announced in May, there wasn’t even simplicity in the scoring system for the Tour Championship finale. This muddied administrative system is the product of decades of compromises and sops to the membership and other constituents. Flicking away that scab will be painful for many.
The most crucial of Rolapp’s philosophical pillars is scarcity. The Tour’s 2026 regular season schedule has 38 stops, not including the Fall tournaments, and features four weeks when two events are staged concurrently. That’s closer to saturation than scarcity. Rolapp’s committee is a mechanism to right-size a product that has long been based (and its executives bonused) on one criteria — creating playing opportunities for members. In short, the Tour incentivized its leaders to dilute the product for parochial interests.
We all understand that the Tour has way too many events, but we also understand that they need enough events to allow new talent to rise. Not to mention field sizes sufficiently large to be credible, though we all know that the elite players covet the LIV model, and no doubt they will have their way.
Back To The Future - The Tour's 2026 schedule has dropped, and guess where we're going back to?
10 changes, surprises from PGA Tour’s 2026 schedule release
1. They’re headed back to DoralThe PGA Tour is returning to one of President Trump’s venues for the first time since he took office in 2016; the “Miami Championship” is scheduled for the week of April 27-May 3. The tournament sponsor hasn’t been finalized but the tournament has been denoted as a Signature Event, which is particularly notable because…
Really? I don't know, isn't that a little insurrectiony?
Didn't someone mention simplicity?
2. There are now nine siggies.Signature Events, if you want full government names. But the slate of siggies is the same as it was in 2024 other than the addition of Doral, which slides into the CJ Cup Byron Nelson’s spot on the calendar. If you’re thinking to yourself, wow, that’s a lot of siggies in a short period of time, that’s because…
3. There are a lot of siggies in a short period of time!
It’ll be a busy schedule for any top players trying to play all the biggest events. The Masters will kick off a wild stretch of five featured events in six weeks: Masters, RBC Heritage (Signature), Zurich Classic, Miami Championship (Signature), Truist Championship (Signature), PGA Championship. Until now, most eligible players have teed it up in most of these events. I’d bet we’ll see more strategic skips next year. It’ll also be an odd spot on the calendar for those without siggy privileges, which I suppose is good news for the Myrtle Beach Classic, which some pros may use as a PGA Championship tune-up. But it seems like bad news for the Valero (the week before the Masters), the Zurich (will Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry really return again? Seems unlikely) and two events post-PGA. Speaking of which…
Which just reminds us that the Tour's core business remains the screwing of its preexisting sponsors. Zurich and Valero will quickly understand that once the ink dries on their sponsorship contracts.....
6. The Pebble-Riv double.The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Genesis Invitational are scheduled for back-to-back weeks following the WM Phoenix Open; that’s particularly notable because they’re two siggies on arguably the Tour’s two greatest golf courses. Sunday night at the Super Bowl followed by a short drive down the coast? Nice work if you can get it.Here’s hoping the Tour can pull off a return to Riviera, too, given the neighborhood was ravaged by wildfires last winter. The 2025 Genesis was moved to Torrey Pines; it’d be great to see the tournament provide a boost to the community if they can bring it back.
Just a reminder that this will be at a time that Tiger and Rory are trying to get bodies to South Florida on Monday and Tuesday evenings for the TGL Season Two. Isn't it great being a Tour sponsor?
One last bit before my exit, Sean Zak helpfully fixes the Tour Championship, but includes some unintentional context:
How to fix the Tour Championship formatThe most important thing you need to know about the Tour Championship — and how it will look in the future — is that it will need to appease and please at least five different parties: the Tour itself, the players, the TV rights holders, the sponsors (FedEx, chiefly) and the fans. Does that create a bit of a Rubik’s Cube, where solving for one impacts the others? Absolutely. But I think we make everyone mostly happy with what follows.1. 30 players, just as there always has been. The Tour is obsessed with having 30 players advance to the TC. Thirty is a great number. It’s the third stage of the playoffs, and everyone who gets there gets a bunch of other stuff, too. They’ll start their season in Hawaii at the Sentry. They’ll also all get invited to the Masters. If we have more than 30 players at the Tour Championship — or much fewer than that number — something is either lost or gained. Thirty is a good number, and it keeps the Tour happy.2. We begin with stroke play. Take it from Rory McIlroy, who spoke on the topic Tuesday: “I think it’s just hard for the players to reconcile that we play stroke play for every week of the year but then the season-ending tournament is going to be decided by match play. I think it was just hard for the players to get their heads around that.”
It’s true. Numerous players on the Tour Policy Board and PAC have said it. You can’t play stroke play all year long and suddenly have only a match-play championship. So we begin with all 30 players at the TC playing two rounds of stroke play.
If you say so, but lets see where you're going with this:
3. Both ends of leaderboard matter. The top two performers after 36 holes will receive a first-round bye on Match Play Saturday. That’s what everyone is after: a much easier road to victory that is earned by solid play. The top 14 players will make the cut, but that is only after a possible playoff for the 14th and final spot. If four players are tied for 13th after two rounds, it’s a four-for-two sudden playoff, which brings us to another part of the puzzle…4. TV execs would love it. When you institute a 36-hole competition, the first 18 holes really matter. And what happens late in the second 18 holes really matters. In other words, that four-for-two playoff would play out late in the day on Friday, hopefully for primetime viewing on the East Coast. Right now, there is little reason at all to watch the second round of the Tour Championship. This would change that.
Read over that last 'graph a couple more times. Because you know when those first two days don't matter? Yeah, when you make your most important events tiny fields without a Friday cut. Just sayin'! Sean has just confirmed that there is little reason to tune into a Siggy before Sunday, not that we hadn't gotten there on our own.
5. Match Play Saturday. The sales team at the PGA Tour — to invoke an all-time comedy line — could sell (sponsorship of) a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves. With a nimble, made-for-TV Tour Championship, I am looking to give them new business opportunities, like Match Play Saturday. Where the 1- and 2-seed have byes into the quarterfinals, and where 4 plays against 13, and 5 plays against 12.
To add some names to those numbers, using scores from the 2024 TC, Collin Morikawa and Scottie Scheffler would have received byes. Tommy Fleetwood (seeded 13th) would have sneaked past 4-seed Sahith Theegala, only to find himself matched up against (and losing to) 5-seed Xander Schauffele in the afternoon. We would have six matches in the morning, and then four in the afternoon, once again ending in primetime. Before anyone doubts match play as a viable TV product, my colleague James Colgan very literally got Sam Flood, NBC executive producer, to comment on that:“There’s no question match play would work for the PGA Tour playoffs,” Flood said. “It would be dramatic for TV, and if it was done the right way, it could be one of the great moments in golf.”
That sound like an endorsement?
6. Playoffs would feel like … playoffs! You’ve heard it countless times — that the FedEx Cup Playoffs need to feel more like actual playoffs. Where players/teams survive and advance from one stage to the next. This format would only lengthen the surviving and advancing period. We’d begin with 70 players, narrow down to 50, then to 30, then 14, eight and, after the quarterfinals, just four. This is where we check the sponsorship box, because for the entire month of August, it would feel like there is a more direct line between the start of the FedEx Cup Playoffs and the end. Between the divisional round and Super Bowl Sunday. That’s a win for the company that sponsors it all, and is probably the most important sponsor in all of pro golf.
7. Building to a Sunday Shootout. Match Play Saturday would create a final four as we move back to stroke play for a neat and orderly shootout. 1 v. 1 v. 1 v. 1, 18 holes, low man wins. This solves for any concerns about a blowout championship match, or any flukey winners. If you have advanced to the final 30, made the top-14 cut after two rounds, advanced through two matches and then beat three other golfers who did the same? You are absolutely worthy of being the FedEx Cup champion.
Look, it's probably a whole lot better than what we have now, but do we still need the first two weeks of the playoffs?
For those who can’t quite imagine it just yet, I used the scores from the 2024 Tour Championship to get us as close as possible. Last year’s Sunday Shootout would have pitted Peak Xander Schauffele against Peak Scottie Scheffler against Peak Collin Morikawa against the birdie machine known as Wyndham Clark.
That kind of entertainment is how we check the box for fans.
Fans? Why start worrying about them now?
But I especially loved the "Birdie machine known as Wyndham Clark". Any chance we could hold it at Oakmont? Because, Sean, he's become a bit of parody these days....
Ryder Cup Watch - It is a bit interesting on both sides of the Atlantic, though there's not all that much to add. I'll just riff on Dylan Dethier's work from his Monday Finish column:
Now what on Earth happens?Team Europe faces a fascinating dilemma. We talked last week about its situation: 11 players from the 2023 team essentially locked in for an encore performance (Rory McIlroy, Robert MacIntyre, Tommy Fleetwood, Justin Rose, Tyrrell Hatton, Shane Lowry, Jon Rahm, Sepp Straka, Ludvig Aberg, Viktor Hovland and Matt Fitzpatrick) plus one complete wild-card spot with front-runners that included Rasmus Hojgaard (No. 8 on the points list) or Harry Hall (the top-ranked FedEx Cup finisher not already named). This week? Rasmus nearly won his home Danish Championship, making eagle at No. 18 to lose by one. Hall, meanwhile, finished solo 6th at the BMW Championship and is clearly in top form.One particularly interesting wrinkle: Rasmus could play his way into the No. 6 spot on the team (and make himself an auto-qualifier) at this week’s British Masters, while Hall (still No. 17 on the points list) can’t earn any points at the Tour Championship. So what do you do?!(Others who could still complicate the picture: Aaron Rai, back in action after missing the top 50 in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, last week’s winner Marco Penge, current Ryder Cup No. 11 Matt Wallace, Norwegian star Kristoffer Reitan and 2023 alum and Rasmus’ twin Nicolai Hojgaard.)
To sum up, it appears that Europe will return eleven of their twelve players from Rome, with the one missing being replaced by his identical twin. Seriously!
Harry Hall is quite the interesting complication, especially since the man can putt. The assumption is that, should Rasmus grab that sixth slot, the guy he replaces will be Shane Lowry, who presumably would have a Luke pick to fall back on. Feels like pretty much a done deal as of now.
For the other guys:
The U.S. team’s situation seems even more confusing. Captain Keegan Bradley now has his six auto-qualifiers — Scottie Scheffler, J.J. Spaun, Xander Schauffele, Russell Henley, Harris English and Bryson DeChambeau. He also seems to have three more nearly guaranteed picks in 7-8-9: Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa and Ben Griffin. Patrick Cantlay at No. 15 also seems like a lock given his consistent form and his team history. But it’s messy. If you were looking for clarity you didn’t find it in Maryland; Maverick McNealy surged back into the conversation with a third-place finish while Sam Burns (T4) stated his case, too. Cameron Young (11th) played well for a third consecutive start while Bradley (T17) played well enough to show decent form, too. Cantlay (T30) and Morikawa (T33), meanwhile, finished closer to the bottom.So now what do you do? Our most scientific solution is something like “lean on vibes.” No matter what happens at East Lake this week, though, we now appear to be hurtling towards a situation where Bradley’s is going to have to make some extremely tough decisions — the toughest being whether to pick himself.
And Dylan lays out how Keegs should decide:
ONE BIG QUESTIONBack to the Ryder Cup. What should Keegan Bradley do?!This may sound very obvious, but let’s talk it through: U.S. captain Keegan Bradley should do whatever he thinks will give his team the best chance to win. If he feels like that involves him playing, and the competitive pressure of playing captain excites him, he should absolutely follow that instinct. If it seems like a terrifying prospect with unthinkable pressure amidst a laundry list of tasks, he should skip it. But he shouldn’t bother pandering to the inevitable second-guessing he’ll face; we’re so far down this that if the U.S. team loses he’ll get crushed and if they win he’ll be a hero and it’s hard to imagine an in-between.
Dylan obviously has some valid thoughts, though I come at it from quite the different perspective.
Here are those current rankings:
1. Scheffler 2. Spaun 3. Schauffele 4. Henley 5. English 6. DeChambeau 7. Thomas 8. Morikawa 9. Griffin 10. McNealy 11. Bradley 12. Harman 13. Novak 14. Young 15. Cantlay
To me, those standings tell us all we need to know. Obviously,. were Bradley not the captain, he'd be in the mix for captain's picks. But, and it's a big but,. he is the captain and I think he actually got the answer right in his first stab at it. the fact of the matter is that he's only gotten himself into the mix, he hasn't made himself irreplaceable as a player. has he made a case that he's demonstrably better or more qualified than Mav McNealy, Brian Harman or Cam Young? So, given that no one knows the implication of a playing captain and that he's not head-and-shoulders above the other guys, how is this even a question?
His acceptance of the captaincy imposes obligations on him to do what's in the best interests of the team, and not taking an unquantifiable risk for limited upside seems a no-brainer.
That's it for today and the week. Have a great weekend and we'll wrap things on Monday.
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