Earlier this month, Tiger Woods appeared to confirm rumors that the Tour and its new CEO, Brian Rolapp, were moving toward a schedule with fewer events and smaller fields. One of Rolapp’s three “governance principles” for the future competition committee, of which Woods is chairman, is scarcity.
“The scarcity thing is something that I know scares a lot of people, but I think if you have scarcity at some level it will be better because it will attract more eyes because there will be less time,” Woods said during the Hero World Challenge. “But don’t forget that the golf year is a long one. So there are other opportunities and other places in the world or other places to play and host events. So there is a scarcity side to it that is not as scary as people might think.”
Woods was clear that there are no details when it comes to a possible scaled-back Tour schedule, but if less is more, which seems to be the unspoken mantra, there are nostalgic concerns that the path many have taken to the circuit would be dramatically narrowed or even cut off altogether.
Tom Lehman, for example, played his way to the Tour via what is now the Korn Ferry Tour, finishing first on the secondary circuit money list in 1991.
“It gave me a fully exempt position, which was the best because there was no rescheduling,” Lehman recalled this week at the PNC Championship, which features players primarily from the PGA Tour Champions.
Under the current system, the Korn Ferry Tour is still the most robust route to the PGA Tour, with the season’s top 20 players earning tickets. But if the PGA Tour schedule is trimmed — some estimate it could be reduced from 38 events in 2025 to just 20 or 25 tournaments — the traditional surge from the secondary circuit could be curtailed.
“It seems like a much more difficult path. I don’t know much about it, but it seems like the ability to be on the outside and get in is more difficult,” Lehman said. “I think the opportunity to prove how good you are is getting smaller and smaller. I’ve always believed that more players are better than fewer players. If you get that opportunity, you can take advantage of it. But if you decrease the opportunity, it becomes harder to be that guy.”
The PGA Tour was bumped up this year, with the top 100 players from the end-of-season points list earning full status in 2026, down from the top 125. The Korn Ferry Tour’s number of fully exempt PGA Tour spots (20) was also reduced from the top 30, and the tickets available through Q-School were reduced slightly to the top-5 finishers, not the top-5 finishers and ties.
If the Tour moves towards fewer events with smaller fields, the circuit might have to shorten those paths again.
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“By reducing the Tour to a smaller number of tournaments, I don’t think it will change the way you compete on the Tour. There will still be players who leave the Tour and you will still have to replace them,” said Stewart Cink, who also earned his PGA Tour status through the Korn Ferry Tour.
“The only way it becomes more difficult, other than the quality of the players you play against, is to reduce the number of players. [available] spots and just squeeze that, which they have already done by reducing from 125 to 100 [on the PGA Tour]. If they keep making everything small, it will of course become smaller.”
For players of Cink and Lehman’s generation, playing the Tour through Q-School or the Korn Ferry Tour was essentially the only option, so any potential changes — and, again, Woods was clear that the committee is reviewing “thousands” of options and that there is still a lot of work to be done — would be scrutinized. However, that does not mean that Rolapp’s vision of the Tour is not shared by many.
‘Maybe not so much [of a pathway]”, Mark O’Meara admitted before adding: “I think there was almost too much golf played over the years. If you look at golf, it’s almost a twelve-month-a-year game with all these different tours. It never stops. Most major sports have a big break, so people are eager to watch.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to cut back, [but] I don’t think I would cut that much.”
Whether or not the Tour will make cuts is unclear, but for players from previous eras, the future of the circuit could look very different.
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