It’s appropriate this year that the most important weeks for the PGA Tour come in the month when there’s no official competition. The Tour has been mired for over a year now in a campaign that has seen the most interesting moves and the most critical news coming away from the golf course. It’s like the NBA offseason, but a lot less fun and with a lot more peril — the Tour could cease to exist due to either a rival upstart OR self-combustion from internal squabbling trying to confront that rival upstart.

Some clarity emerged on point two on Sunday night, with the PGA Tour’s Policy Board sending a memo to players (and later posted in an article on the PGA Tour’s website, which itself is an indicator of the strange times we live in) that they had unanimously selected the Strategic Sports Group of investors to further negotiate with in conjunction with the Saudi PIF. The memo also added that the Tour would be “advancing our negotiations with PIF in the weeks to come.”

The SSG is a gaggle of billionaire sports owners and their investment firms, including Fenway Sports Group. The “unanimous” decision from the board was undoubtedly hastened by the PIF-funded LIV Golf plucking away Jon Rahm just before its weekend meetings. The leverage play was a foreboding reminder of what could be if the Tour doesn’t get its shit together. A Thursday night report from Sports Illustrated’s Michael Rosenberg, shortly after the Rahm defection, portrayed a Tour board in chaos, with Pat Cantlay in power, a pervading distrust of commissioner Jay Monahan, and a lack of clear-headed direction. Then came a Friday AP article with quotes from Jordan Spieth, who just joined the board after Rory McIlroy’s curiously abrupt resignation, pushing back hard on that report and the portrayal of Cantlay. The two dueling reports did not exactly leave one with an air of confidence that the internecine squabbles might subside, or that all parties could be whipped into shape in order to proceed on the matter of saving the PGA Tour’s future.

The Sunday memo helps quell that noise for the time being, but now talks and negotiations with the PIF must progress. A few questions remain:

Who is leading the PGA Tour?

The LIV threat has exposed many institutional and structural deficiencies that the PGA Tour had never needed to fix as they operated for decades without any real competition. But the Tour does have a commissioner, nominally at least. One thing the last few weeks have revealed, from Rosenberg’s report to Tiger’s remarks at his Hero World Challenge, is just how deep the Jay Monahan resentment runs after the secretive process around the June 6th “merger” announcement. The heat of that anger has not faded. How much longer is he going to have the job? And what real power does he even have now, anyway? Cantlay having the conch shell may be a stretch, but the Tour does not seem to have an empowered voice managing it during a critical moment, the kind of situation when strong and competent management is desperately necessary. This cannot devolve into several board members squabbling and investment partners sniping, either behind the scenes or through the press. There can and will be many power players pushing towards the final agreement, all with voices to be considered. But there’s got to be a captain.

What are the Tour’s priorities?

The answer to this may depend on the answer to the first question, as whoever is leading or holding the real power will likely push their own vision for the Tour’s future. A very clear emerging issue in recent weeks is the battle among rank-and-file players, or “mules,” and the max contract superstar players. There is no viable Tour for the mules if the superstars follow the Rahm path. But various proposals have still favored appeasing the larger membership more. It does not sound like the original plan put on the table back at the Delaware meeting had them in mind at all. So sorting the larger membership’s requests for whatever redesigned Tour comes out of all this will apparently remain an issue, especially as the board will maintain some mule representation.

Also, is vengeance a priority? It does not seem like LIV Golf, or at least its team structure, is going away. Will the negotiators accept that? Will they be able to get over their resentment of players who left for big up-front paydays becoming “colleagues” again as part of any sort of reunited Tour

Who will be its partners?

We now know which private equity suitor received the final rose, meaning we actually have some clarity on this one with only three weeks left before the year-end negotiation deadline. They are planning for the PIF and SSG to be partners in the newly formed for-profit company that will preside over the PGA Tour. PIF’s moves last week to land Rahm should make it clear that internal hang-ups around involving them need to be set aside. But as we’ve seen in the months since June 6th, partners in name only are worth very little until all the details are sorted and a deal is finalized, which isn’t easy given all of the egos involved here.

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It’s not hyperbole to suggest these may be the most important weeks in the PGA Tour’s history. These are massive decisions on the future existence of the PGA Tour, and decisions like that take time. It feels like we’ve had a lot of these “most critical moments in Tour history” over the past two years, and none of those moments have had anything to do with a golf shot. That’s not a sustainable model. Everyone suffers for it. Something has to give here.

This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.