Professional golf is on TV practically every week of the year. A major tour in some part of the world is having a golf tournament, and typically, there are multiple tours with events in 50 or 51 weeks of the calendar.
Frankly, it's a lot of golf. Rickie Fowler is wondering if the sport, particuarly the PGA Tour, need to dial it back a bit.
Speaking ahead of the Cognizant Classic in the Palm Beaches at PGA National, Fowler was asked about the tour and potential innovations or changes it can make in response to LIV Golf. Eschewing shotgun starts, more no-cut events and 54-hole tournaments, Fowler suggested one of the best things the Tour could do is to make its product more scarce by having fewer tournaments.
"I do feel like the season, where it's at with the January to August, is there ways to do different things in the fall, but I also at the same time feel like we kind of have to create the want for golf," Fowler explained. "Right now you can basically watch golf every week of the year for the most part. There's not really an off-season.
"I feel like with other sports, people can't wait for football preseason to start up, and that's just preseason. The games don't really matter a whole lot.
"Something along those lines to create a little bit more of a demand for golf because depending on how you want to talk about it, is the product potentially diluted with how much golf is available."
In recent years, the PGA Tour has put on in upwards of 50 tournaments per year, including a handful of weeks with two tournaments in a given week. Starting in 2024, the Tour has gone back to a calendar-year schedule, with the FedEx Cup season contested from January through August. However, the FedEx Cup Fall remains a part of the schedule, too, acting as a long-form Q-School of sorts, whereby the 75 players in the points standings following the 50 players who qualify for the BMW Championship earn PGA Tour cards for the next year. There are other rewards on the line, too, including Signature event starts, but these events do not draw in nearly the same way as the FedEx Cup season events.
However, cutting tournaments means cutting playing opportunities, which have already been reduced for some players this year as a result of a more compact schedule featuring better purses and tournaments for elite players. Ultimately, that's a key part of the mission of the PGA Tour as a membership organization, and that may be difficult to get away from even with the upheaval of the last several years.
Still, the DP World Tour has shifted significant tournaments in their schedule, including the flagship BMW PGA Championship, Irish Open, French Open and more to the fall so it can attract their best members to compete in the PGA Tour off-season of sorts. The changes to the PGA Tour schedule have already proven beneficial for the quality of those fields.
However, there's also been a suggestion that LIV Golf could be integrated into an aligned PGA Tour-DP World Tour-LIV Golf world as part of an isolated fall series. Then the point stands that the DP World Tour fall schedule could suffer just as quickly as it started to thrive, and that LIV Golf as its own series in the fall could prove just as much of a dilution of the full professional golf product as anything else.
There's only so much golf fans can watch and invest in throughout the year. Even adding more tournaments with top-tier players has not proven to overcome the yearly cadence in which fans take their attention from one sport to another.
