My Vision of the new PGA Tour

Could this be the future of professional golf?

LIV Golf is here, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s by no means a superior product, but it’s very existence and “success” (however that is defined) is only highlighting the issues with the current PGA Tour product. Garrett Morrison of The Fried Egg went to the tournament in Portland and the podcast “We Regret To Inform You The LIV Golf Product Does Not Suck” is well worth a listen on this. It’s here, and with the seemingly unlimited resources behind it, it’s here for awhile.

The PGA Tour is scrambling and as detailed here has responded with some fundamental changes that should make the product better for athletes and viewers alike. It may all be too little, too late - but I’ve been thinking about it, and trying to think about what would really work for ME - and I think, therefore, for other golf fans.

LIV and the PGL talked about forming teams, aka Formula One - but in practice thus far, that’s not really what’s happened with LIV. Their teams are … really weird. Some of them seem to be geographically designed (there’s a South African team and a Japanese team, for instance) but otherwise it’s a tossup from my purview. The names are also meaningless and team names like the Majesticks and the 4 Aces have gotten well deserved ribbing.

But in Formula One, and racing in general, teams are aligned around “constructors” - that is, automobile manufacturers. The Ferrari team drives a car with an engine from Ferrari, the Mercedes from Mercedes - and then some other teams also use a Ferrari engine, or outsource it to a company like Honda who doesn’t have their own car.

McLaren driver Lando Norris does love golf. But we’re talking about the structure of the sport here.

What if teams were based around golf equipment and clothing manufacturers? (It would be great if it were all clubs, but there simply aren’t enough premium club makers out there anymore.) Today, when a top golfer switches equipment, it’s almost always about money as they are getting sponsored to do so. This would be the same. In F1, drivers usually sign short term deals and the offseason stays relevant when teams decide to not re-sign a driver or bring another up from Formula 2, etc., or poach a driver from another team. Golf has NONE of this.

So, let’s try an experiment. Like F1, we’re going to have ten teams. Each team should have at least 15 golfers - and we’ll soon see that (using existing contract/sponsorships) some teams have an excess of talent while others clearly do not. We’ll need to get a bit creative here.

F1 has around 22-25 races a year, so let’s use a similar amount here for golf, which includes our four majors and THE PLAYERS. Like F1, each team should have a few reserve golfers in case of injury, etc.

Our teams:

1. Titleist

2. FootJoy

3. PING

4. Callaway

5. TaylorMade

6. Srixon/Cleveland

7. PXG

8. Nike

9. Mizuno/Wilson/Cobra

10. Unaffiliated

Titleist and FootJoy are both owned by Acushnet, so there’s a huge overlap here. With smaller club manufactures like Mizuno, Wilson and Cobra, they just don’t currently sponsor enough golfers. In the real world, the tour would want one of these - probably Cobra - to step up and buy a franchise, which would mean offering enough golfers the money to use their clubs.

A few ground rules I’ve thought up here as well - one, there would need to be a salary cap, and one that would work for ALL teams. That would likely be way less than TaylorMade or Callaway would want to pay, but not so prohibitive as to prevent Cobra or Mizuno from entering the ring.

That salary cap would go to paying their golfers an annual guaranteed salary, which would hopefully be enough - especially for the very best - to compete at least a little bit with LIV. In addition, because this is a team sport, teams would get paid out by the PGA Tour in order of how many points they earned for the season, which should feed back to the golfers AND club development.

Two, while a lot of people on Team Titleist use their irons, a lot of guys are there because they play their golf ball. And some of our teams are not sponsored by club manufacturers.

So, Scottie Scheffler would have to wear Nike gear, but he could play any clubs or golf ball he so chooses. He might no longer get PAID to use those clubs or that golf ball, but if he wanted to use them anyway, he certainly could.

But, for example, if Jon Rahm suddenly didn’t want to play Callaway clubs but played for Team Callaway? Too bad, Jon. That’s part of the guaranteed contract you signed for this and potentially future seasons.

This has a way of making teams like Nike, or an Unaffiliated (called the Bezos team for no reason whatsoever) perhaps more appealing. Because these players could use whatever equipment they wanted but still get paid that guaranteed annual salary.

So what might the teams look like? Here’s a guess - again, this is just based on todays sponsorships, and includes both PGA and LIV golfers.

These guys - Titleist, TaylorMade, Callaway are your hitters. These are the Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari teams. Indeed, they may be TOO top heavy, something that would get sorted out as teams actually drafted. But let’s proceed.

Here we have the mid-tier, with FootJoy (aligned with Team Titleist) and Nike the heavy favorites to compete. They’re also likely to be big fan favorites, especially with Tiger Woods on board at least for a year or two. These are the teams that should score points every week but are unlikely to win the season long contest ahead of the top three teams.

Also, think about how hilarious it would be to see some new guys on the Nike team wear those terrible, terrible outfits Tony Finau throws on so willingly.

Finally, we get the lower ranks - the Haas and Williams equivalents, but these guys have their hitters too - Viktor Hovland, Cameron Smith, Brooks Koepka, Hideki Matsuyama and others are real players. PXG can be the villain here (I get big Rich Energy vibes here) but again, any of these guys could compete.

This is Luke List. One benefit of this new format is it would be much more likely that a casual golf fan could recognize Luke List without a caption like this.

And remember, we probably would want to rotate out a lot of the dead weight here and pull in some KFT players as well as players from other worldwide tours. But the beauty here is that each team has more than one guy who could legitimately win the individual money title and as such, every team will be scoring points every week and be in the season long hunt.

Club manufacturers should love this, if they believe in their product. If TaylorMade just dominates, that has to lead to more club sales. And if, as one might expect, PXG can’t compete - that’s hilarious too.

What’s more, again I started from existing contracts for this exercise. But if this was to truly re-set, it would be a free-for-all and as long as the golfers were willing to mix up their equipment (if the price was right) this could get really fun. And the “Team Bezos” element could create a truly nuts sweepstakes. Heck, Greg Norman could own a team if he could afford it!

Imagine if towards the end of the season, there were rumors that Titleist was looking to poach Jon Rahm and told Ian Poulter his time was up. How juicy would that be? Imagine if Patrick Reed looked around and found that the only team that was willing to sign him was PXG? How much fun would THOSE tweets from @usegolfFACTS be? Good stuff.

Ian Poulter sees the future.

And every year, there would a few Korn Ferry Tour hitters coming up (the above doesn’t include ANY of these guys, 25 who will have their PGA card every year) and fans could wonder openly which aging veterans were going to be kicked to the curb?

(It just occurred to me that each team would need a ‘team principal’ like Christian Horner and Toto Wolff. This could very much be an old retired veteran who stops playing on the Champions Tour.)

There’s a lot of runway here, but the most important thing is … this would still be PGA golf. There’d be cuts at every tournament, there’d be real competition - both weekly and season long - and in general it would be stroke play like we’re all used to. It would just be way, way more fun.

At least for me.