2 red flags from the PGA Tour CEO's new vision of professional golf

Change is scary, and both by demographic and disposition, golfers and golf fans are more resistant to it than their peers in other sports.

Brian Rolapp, a former longtime NFL executive who in June of 2025 became the CEO of the PGA Tour, is an agent of change at a time when golf has never had a more pronounced presence in the greater sports landscape.

On Wednesday of the week of the 2026 Players Championship, he held his inaugural Ponte Vedra press conference that doubles as a “State of the Union” address about professional competitive golf’s biggest organization. It was a particularly important one: Rolapp’s first, at a time when rumors about wholesale changes to the schedule and structure of the PGA Tour have stirred consternation and confusion from fans to players to sponsors.

Rolapp’s opening statement and answers for media questions contained a lot of encouraging material, but two red flags still wave ominously.

“[W]e want to open big with a marquee event at an iconic venue in the west, among other things, allowing us to finish on network television in primetime on the East Coast,” Rolapp said. While I love primetime evening golf as much as any east-coast fan, I take “the west” to mean “the west coast.” In other words, not Hawaii, which has been where the PGA Tour has started since the 1990s.

While Kapalua’s Plantation course has come to fit the definition of “iconic venue” in the eyes of golf fans, the tournament most recently known as The Sentry has always been more of a whisper-start due to the modest crowds and small field comprising mostly tournament winners from the previous year. If indeed the new PGA Tour has no room for Hawaii, it will be a missed opportunity to showcase one of America’s most beloved places at a time when most of the country is not able to play golf. Even if the crowd is quiet and the field is small, the escapism that The Sentry – and even the Sony Open at Waialae – offered was a comforting winter remedy. This is more valuable than tour brass likely realize.

“[W]e are also looking closely at where we play,” Rolapp said, noting that the PGA Tour currently competes in only four of America’s 10 largest media markets: Los Angeles (#2), Dallas-Fort Worth (#4), Houston (#6) and Atlanta (#7). Four of the top 10 sounds a little more ominous than "four of the top seven," doesn't it? Rolapp expressed a desire to see the tour call regularly on New York, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia and Boston, among others.

No one would deny that all of those markets are attractive and rabid sports towns, but what of the less populous but relentlessly loyal places that helped turn the PGA Tour into a significant sports entity over decades? Should a thirst for bigger-time host cities trump that? Several of the PGA Tour’s best events are great because they happen in smaller markets without competition from other sports, not in spite of it.

I grew up 35 minutes from TPC River Highlands, and I was crying in the stands on April 13, 1997, the night the Hartford Whalers played their last game. That left what is now the Travelers Championship as the marquee professional sporting event in southern New England, and people and companies have embraced it for decades. It is the second highest-attended non-major behind the WM Phoenix Open.

The notion of the PGA Tour hypothetically leaving Connecticut in order to try to be the fifth-biggest thing going on around New York one weekend per summer is nauseating. The idea of the PGA Tour leaving Hilton Head – and Harbour Town, an iconic venue in golf if ever there was one – is utterly absurd, and would show a profound lack of understanding that golf will always be a niche sport, and that that fact is a feature, not a bug.

Rolapp should remember that two of the most loyal fanbases in his previous sport are Green Bay (U.S. media market #68) and Buffalo (#54). Abandoning smaller cities would be a slap in the face to countless fans and local organizations that have gratefully supported professional golf for generations.

When pressed on this issue, Rolapp did dismiss the specter of moving away from smaller markets as “a misconception.” But numbers are hard to wave away. If the tour wants to add larger markets to its schedule, and wants to optimize the size of that schedule at between 21 and 26 total events, something will have to give. Some markets will lose out. As strong as many smaller-city tour events have been for decades, even if they are demoted to a proposed second tier of the new tour, it will be cold comfort after decades of support through good times and bad.

“[W]e know there's huge population centers of new fans when you look at the data,” Rolapp said, later adding “You need to go to where they are as well, and those big markets certainly have that.” That is a logical response on the surface, but try telling that to kids in the markets at risk of losing beloved golf tournaments they have come to know and love.

Rolapp’s stated mission is “to build the best version of the PGA Tour, one that better serves our fans, players, and partners.” His brain trust and construction crew includes several tour members past and present, headlined by Tiger Woods, who chairs the tour’s Future Competition Committee. Other players in high-leverage positions include Adam Scott, Patrick Cantlay, Maverick McNealy and Keith Mitchell.

Those players and PGA Tour brass have the power to make or break golf as a professional sport in the medium to long term. A great deal about how the elite competitive game works is not broken, and what is on shaky ground does not need much in order to be significantly improved.

Most of Rolapp’s ruminations on the future of pro golf are, on balance, positive. For instance, his stress of the word “meritocracy” is encouraging, as is his suggestion that the PGA Tour of the future should revolve around 120-player fields with a halfway cut. This is a massive improvement over the dreary “Signature Event” model with several fields of fewer than 80 players and no 36-hole cut, with struggling stars and the in-crowd conspicuously sopping up sponsor exemptions.

Signature Events were originally envisioned to become the highest-profile non-majors, but fields of 72 or so players with no cut amount to little more than glorified golf All-Star Games that feel sterile, with scant opportunities for underdog stories to materialize and give the stars more shine by contrast. At least the old World Golf Championships spread the game to far-off countries sometimes.

“This is not a closed shop,” Rolapp said. I will take him at his word, but the last few years preceding his reign have sowed doubt about that.

Another positive takeaway from Rolapp’s address: a newly-open door to allow match play to have a place in PGA Tour golf in the future. “We have heard from our fans and our partners, they want more drama,” he said. “We are considering the potential integration of match play, either at the TOUR Championship or across the post-season as a whole, bringing win-or-go-home moments to the conclusion of our season.

The PGA Tour should embrace match play. Virtually every sport is a form of match play, after all. Football teams don’t aggregate their passing, running and tackling abilities; they square off one-on-one. How lame would basketball be if skills challenges were the norm? It is direct head-to-head conflict that makes sport thrilling. Stroke-play golf is familiar and often entertaining enough, at least by the back nine on Sundays, but match play's hole-to-hole volatility can be gripping from the outset. Not for nothing, the explosively popular YouTube golf movement often revolves around matches of one type or another. There's a lesson in that.

As for the rest of Rolapp’s ideas, which he emphasized were still evolving and had not been formally submitted for approval, the one where I am in wait-and-see mode is the proposed two-track nature of the PGA Tour, with a system of promotion and relegation between the upper and lower level. This could be interesting, but would the lower track sit above the Korn Ferry Tour? Will the PGA Tour genuinely let a struggling marquee player languish in the minor leagues or come up with ways to keep him in the limelight? I’m not sure, but it sounds like I and millions of golf fans will find out soon. Here’s hoping the changes, when finalized, keep pro golf worth watching.