Hideki Matsuyama’s thrilling 62 delivered a much-needed Sunday to remember for the PGA Tour, capping off a lackluster West Coast Swing. The Tour’s premiere run of tournaments typically forms the perfect build for major championship season, setting up the storylines to watch for the year. 2024’s edition left a lot to be desired.

That’s especially when compared to 2023, which saw the calendar year kick off with wins from Jon Rahm (over Collin Morikawa) at Kapalua, Si Woo Kim at the Sony, Jon Rahm again at the American Express, Southern Californian Max Homa winning at Torrey, Justin Rose recapturing some magic at Pebble, Scottie Scheffler going back-to-back in Scottsdale, and Jon Rahm earning a third win in five starts by outdueling Homa at Riviera. It was a sensational stretch of golf that teed up the year-long battle between Rahm and Scheffler.

This year was, well, not that. The annual Hawaiian jaunt saw wins from Chris Kirk at Kapalua and Grayson Murray at Waialae, both redemption stories but neither big enough names to really grab attention.

Nick Dunlap winning the American Express as an amateur was a massive story among golf diehards, the kind of moment that could have earned the PGA Tour mainstream sports headlines. Unfortunately it happened during the NFL’s busiest playoff weekend.

Torrey Pines has a major-championship pedigree, but a win from a player (Mathieu Pavon) unknown to most Americans against a mediocre leaderboard was never going to capture attention.

With the NFL on a pre-Super Bowl bye and the Tour at Pebble Beach with a stacked field, an atmospheric river washed out the scheduled finish. U.S. Open champ Wyndham Clark would certainly qualify as a wonderful West Coast winner, but his win came via an anticlimactic press release late on Sunday night as the tournament was called after 54 holes. Adding insult to injury for the Tour, it left the Sunday broadcast window wide open for LIV. (Though the Tour’s rain-delay coverage still won the golf viewership battle for the day.)

The best battle of the West Coast swing came in Scottsdale, with Nick Taylor chasing down Charley Hoffman and then birdieing the tough 18th hole three straight times (twice in the playoff). But due to weather delays all weekend, this excitement all took place during the first half of the Super Bowl. And the main narrative from Phoenix wasn’t Taylor’s win, but whether the crowd was too drunk.

So the Tour was due for a good break. They got one with Hideki Matsuyama finding high-level form and shooting arguably the greatest final round in Riviera history. But the slow start to the season highlights multiple deep-rooted issues with the PGA Tour in its current form.

The Tour has lost a lot of star power to LIV. Notably Jon Rahm, who owned the West Coast swing last year. Having three tournaments with an absentee defending champion is a tough situation, and the talent issue actually goes far beyond Rahm. The Tour is dangerously close to trailing LIV in terms of top-end talent, and it really shows in small-field events that are supposed to feature the world’s best in one place.

Also highlighting the talent drain is the lack of good play from the top players still on Tour. Our Garrett Morrison detailed this in a thread on Saturday. His main findings: no player from the PGA Tour’s Player Impact Program top 10 has finished better than 3rd in an event this year, and only one player from the PIP top 20 has won. That was Wyndham Clark, in rain-shortened fashion.

Weather was the other contributing factor. The West Coast is often delightful in the months of January and February, but at times it can be nasty. This year was more of the latter, and it derailed two of their best events. The Tour was always going to struggle to match last year’s incredible run of tournaments and winners.

Bad weather luck, overperformances by underdogs, and a lot of no-shows from their remaining top guns put them even farther behind. It was always going to be hard to live up to last year’s incredible run of tournaments. But that the Tour didn’t really come close has to be viewed as a disappointment.

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