On Tuesday, the PGA Tour emailed players a slide deck of proposed changes to the Tour, which will be voted on by the PGA Tour Policy Board. Ryan French of Monday Q published the full email outlining these changes, set to take effect in 2026 if approved.

Here’s a high-level overview:

  • Field Size Reduction: Many tournaments will reduce field sizes, allowing rounds to be completed within one day even in limited daylight.
  • Exemption Status: Fully exempt status will now be reserved for the top 100 finishers in the FedEx Cup, down from 125.
  • Korn Ferry Tour Cards: The number of PGA Tour cards granted to Korn Ferry Tour graduates will drop from 30 to 20.
  • Monday Qualifiers: Qualifier spots will be either reduced or fully eliminated, varying by the tournament.
  • Sponsor Exemptions: Spots historically reserved for restricted sponsor exemptions will be replaced by the next eligible PGA Tour players based on priority ranking.
  • FedEx Cup Points: Points distribution will change, narrowing the gap between finishes in Signature Events and Non-Signature Events outside the top 10 on the leaderboard.
    • Example: Currently, a 19th-place finish at the Travelers Championship earns 105 points, while a 19th-place finish at the Sony Open earns 47 points. Under the new system, a 19th-place finish at the Travelers would be worth 60 points, with no changes to the points at the Sony.
  • Pace of Play: Minor tweaks will be made to the pace-of-play policy, though the changes look like they’ll incentivize slower play, if anything.

Reactions to the proposed changes have been mixed, but the bulk of the reactions I’ve seen miss the forest for the trees. With the competitive threat LIV Golf brought to the traditionally unrivaled PGA Tour, the PGA Tour had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make sweeping changes. They haven’t done that. The changes they’ve made may feel seismic from the viewpoint of a professional golfer, but to the average fan, the PGA Tour looks a heck of a lot like it looked in 2017. Despite having the rare opportunity to transform its product, the Tour has yet to address its biggest shortcomings.

In fairness to the Tour, the proposed changes are directionally correct and much of the blowback can be easily argued against. The changes are targeted at creating a more competitive, equitable tour with clean pathways that promote upward mobility, and the changes will deliver on that front. By reducing the number of exempt PGA Tour players from 125 to 100, the PGA Tour will provide more opportunities for rising talent to get into fields more quickly.

For instance, Patrick Fishburn, who earned his PGA Tour card for the 2024 season by finishing 19th on the Korn Ferry Tour in 2023, couldn’t get a spot in the 2024 Sony Open due to a low priority ranking. There is no world in which Ryan Moore, who competed in the Sony off a 117th-place finish in the FedEx Cup the previous season, should have had a higher priority ranking than Fishburn. Under the proposed changes, the 20 Korn Ferry Tour graduates will get playing opportunities faster at the expense of the players barely hanging on for status at the bottom of the FedEx Cup standings. That’s a good change.

Now some will argue that cutting the cards earned via the Korn Ferry Tour from 30 to 20 is a step in the wrong direction. I’ll challenge that. In the 2024 PGA Tour season, KFT graduates who finished between 21 and 30 on the KFT points list each played ~20-25 PGA Tour events. Those ten players combined for four total top 10s on the PGA Tour in 2024, all of which were earned in Myrtle Beach, Puntacana, and TPC Craig Ranch. Not the strongest fields on Tour…

The reality is that if you are good enough to compete on the PGA Tour, the established and recently improved pathways give you the chance to climb up to the top ranks. Burgeoning talent isn’t getting blocked. Monday qualifiers aren’t busting down the door and destroying fields once they get their opportunity. It’s not happening.

Concerns have also been raised that all of the Tour’s recent changes disadvantage lower-profile tournaments like the John Deere Classic, arguing that top players will no longer attend. Here’s a link to the 2018 John Deere Classic leaderboard. That problem already existed.

Incentivizing top players to show up to lower-profile tournaments was an inevitable challenge independent of recent changes on the PGA Tour, especially the richer and more comfortable the top players on Tour became. This issue is not unique to golf. The NBA, for example, is actively working to strike the right balance between mandating players show up for games and creating natural incentives for teams to show up and compete. Elite NBA players on guaranteed contracts aren’t always keen to play the second leg of back-to-back games on a Tuesday night against the Charlotte Hornets. Managing incentives properly isn’t easy. However, to that point, Jordan Spieth played in the John Deere Classic this year for the first time since 2015. He played because he was positioned outside the top 50 in the FedEx Cup standings and needed the opportunity for FedEx Cup points, not because the Tour stipulated his participation.

The biggest issue the Tour faces, the existential one, is whether or not anyone wants to watch their golf tournaments. Unless the Tour addresses that issue, no other changes will ultimately matter. Ratings for PGA Tour events were down this year, and there’s a growing list of sponsors and former sponsors – Wells Fargo, Honda, RBC, Shriners, Sanderson, Zozo, etc. – who have publicly expressed disapproval of the PGA Tour’s value proposition in one way or another. Throughout 2024, the marketplace told the PGA Tour that it isn’t enjoying its product. Getting fans to tune into the Sony Open is important, and fan interest won’t change based on whether the field features 120 players or 144.

Perhaps $20 million purses with 72-player fields and a 50-player cutline aren’t the right recipe for the PGA Tour’s premier set of events. I’ll cut the Tour some slack for landing on that structure, though, because by limiting field size, they’re creating scarcity for spots and fostering competition among the players competing for spots in those fields. However, if that tournament format doesn’t jive with fans, everything else is moot.

Where I will not cut the Tour any slack is in its failure to address crucial issues relevant to the product: its persistence in rejecting all regulation aimed at reining in the fargiving equipment that’s deskilled the sport and rendered the majority of venues obsolete, little emphasis on taking the Tour to strong, interesting venues or major U.S. markets like New York, Chicago, and Boston (not even to mention International development), a season-ending championship that nobody can support with a straight face, and commercial-stuffed broadcasts that throw a middle finger up at the shrinking field of fans who still remain engaged with the Tour’s product.

The truth is that the product needed improvement before LIV arrived, and the product needs improvement now. We can debate exemption categories and FedEx Cup points until we’re blue in the face, but none of that matters unless people want to watch the product itself. The “optimal field size” for a tournament nobody wants to watch is zero.

My suspicion is that barring major progress towards a deal with the PIF and true wholesale changes, the Tour is going to wind up in exactly the same spot a year from now that it is in now. Ratings won’t magically turn around, more sponsors will be disgruntled with what they receive in return for their dollars, and the Tour will be left searching for answers despite all the “drastic” changes they’ve made to “overhaul” their product.

So while the PGA Tour’s proposed changes move the Tour in the right direction and should be commended, not a single one of them addresses the most important problems the Tour should be focused on solving.

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