by Last Wednesday, the results of the 2023 Player Impact Program (PIP) were released. The top five finishers were Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods, Jon Rahm, Jordan Spieth, and Scottie Scheffler. In total, the top 20 players in the PIP standings received $100 million.
Three years removed from the introduction of the PIP, two things remain true:
- The PGA Tour absolutely needed to find a way to funnel money to the most popular players on the PGA Tour
- The Player Impact Program should never have seen the light of day
I have a bunch of issues with the implementation of the PIP, but if I had to narrow my grievances down to two bullets, I’d go with the lack of both transparency and precision in the formula used to calculate PIP standings for one, and how the incentives created by the PIP stray from its objectives for the other.
Talking formula flaws first, the five measurement criteria (linked above) are:
- Nielsen Brand Exposure
- Google Search Data
- Meltwater Media Mentions
- MARC General Population Awareness
- MARC Golf Fan Awareness
Considering that this formula is what decides how to distribute $100 million, each piece of criteria deserves scrutiny, but I’ll just focus on the elements with which I’d take the most issue if I were a PGA Tour member.
First, how is Google search data captured? If someone searches “Wesley Bryan Golf YouTube” it’s pretty clear they’re searching for PGA Tour member Wesley Bryan. What if they search “Wes Brian”? There’s quite a bit of technical complexity in accounting for Google searches, especially across languages. Is “T Moore golf” a search for Taylor Moore? The PGA Tour shouldn’t have put themselves in the position of answering these types of questions.
Second, I’d raise similar questions about Meltwater media mentions, which theoretically track player media mentions across different media. In addition to being skeptical about how this data is captured, I’m curious about things like how much of a boost players get when the PGA Tour’s own social media accounts promote a particular player. The PGA Tour posted a 50-minute highlight reel for Max Homa on his birthday a week ago. The video has 580,000+ views on X. How does the tour choose which players to promote on their channels? I don’t remember an hour-long tribute to Patrick Cantlay on his birthday.
You could ask similar questions of Nielsen brand exposure, a measure of a player’s presence on linear television broadcasts during weekend rounds of competition. CBS walk-and-talks are valuable vehicles for getting broadcast exposure and thus boosting one’s PIP score. Who decides who gets those opportunities?
In early 2022, I was chatting with the agent of a mid-level PGA Tour player. When I asked him about the Player Impact Program, he laughed and said, “Yeah, I guess I’m supposed to wine and dine some TV executives so they’ll put my clients on TV.” He has a point. Even the appearance of potential impropriety is dangerous.
You might roll your eyes at some of the questions I’m posing, but the answers matter when a black-boxed formula is responsible for distributing nine figures.
Whether or not $100 million is being moved around, transparency always matters. For good reason, the PGA Tour has earned the reputation of being a boys club that favors the “in-crowd” of players. The Tour doesn’t help itself when it distributes $100 million to players via an opaque popularity contest. It also doesn’t help when one of the criteria for measuring impact used to be the MVP Index, a metric invented by a company co-founded by Jordan Spieth’s father Shawn Spieth. The PGA Tour removed the MVP Index from the PIP calculation prior to the 2023 season, but that it was used at all raises questions about the Tour’s integrity in building out the PIP calculation.
Related: how much money are people being paid to design and maintain this formula? What kinds of checks are the third-party data companies pulling in? I have questions!
The best question, of course, is why does any of this exist? It shouldn’t.
The PIP should never have been approved and deployed, but it isn’t too difficult to imagine how it came to be. Some PGA Tour executives probably thought they were cleverly incentivizing elite players to promote the Tour across multiple platforms by being entertaining and engaging on top of playing well on the course.
I’d counter that those incentives already exist. Popular players like Max Homa receive lucrative sponsorship opportunities because they’re great players and a lot of fun on social media. Michael Kim’s recent initiative to be active on X and give his followers insight into his life as a professional golfer will bear fruit for him. He didn’t need a Player Impact Program to tell him to do that. I highly, highly doubt that any PGA Tour member looked at the PIP standings from last week and thought to himself, “You know what, I should play better and try to get more fans.”
If the goal was to incentivize elite, popular talent, a much better solution was right in front of the tour’s face. I’ll say it for the 100th time: the PGA Tour should have an All-Star Weekend. Players could earn participation in an All-Star Weekend full of skills challenges based on a 50% performance, 50% fan-vote split. The tour could pay out $100 million among the winners of different skills challenges. All-Star Weekend would be compelling to watch, and sponsors could fund much of the prize pool. This would be a much more elegant solution to the problem of how to reward the best and most popular players in the world while also adding a new and potentially amazing product for fans.
Rather than quietly spit out $100 million via an opaque formula with no product attached, an All-Star Weekend would deliver value for both players and fans. Instead, we’re all stuck with the Player Impact Program for at least another year, albeit reduced down to a $50 million pool next year.
I can’t wait to see who wins.
This piece originally appeared in The Fried Egg newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
