Here are 6 things you need to know

The PGA Tour is officially getting smaller.

On Monday evening, the Tour’s Policy Board approved changes to golf’s major tour championships, fundamentally changing the size and competitive structure of the league. Monday’s announcement was just a formality — the expected outcome after months of discussions by the Tour’s Players Advisory Council produced “proposed changes” that began circulating among members in recent weeks. The changes were key to getting through the Policy Board, a 12-member council with six players who rarely stray from the membership’s mandate.

The changes usher in a new era for the PGA Tour that can best be described in one word: to be special. Under the new rules, the highest level of golf will now be harder to reach, more challenging to reach on a week-to-week basis and will be much smaller than it has been for years.

So, how does everything look? And what do you, the fan, need to know? We break it all down into 6 key points below.

1. OK, what do I need to know?

You need to know that the PGA Tour recently effectively reduced the size of its full-time membership by 20 percent, reducing the total number of full-time employees on Tour from 125 players to 100. The changes have the downstream effect of reducing field sizes and eligibility criteria (we’ll get into that later), meaning that there won’t be only a few PGA Tour cards, however, will also be hard to come by.

The changes come as the Tour’s response to a series of competitive challenges that have made its “brand” lose steam. In theory, the changes make every shot, moment and event more important than ever, helping to streamline the Tour’s competitive framework and improve efforts to keep the Tour brand in shape for the future.

“The PAC negotiations were based on a number of guiding principles, including our belief that PGA Tour membership is the pinnacle of success for men’s professional golf,” PGA Tour board member Adam Scott said in a letter to the membership Monday evening. “The changes approved today will provide equal playing opportunities to showcase new talent, and positively improve the playing experience for our members.”

2. What else is changing?

The tour is also reducing the number of full-time travel cards awarded to Korn Ferry Tour top finishers (from 30 to 20), Q School graduates (top 5 now, not top 5), and will be eliminating qualifiers they are on Monday in many of its events.

The tour will reduce field sizes at many of its events. It also proposed a new system to enforce the speed of play rules that would toughen penalties for repeat offenders (while reducing the penalty for one slow round).

3. What happens to the boys left behind by the new changes?

Thankfully, the changes won’t completely eliminate 25 players from the Tour. Misters 101-125 will still have opportunities to play on the Tour with “conditional status” and sponsor exemptions, which will allow them to play at events where the stadiums are not filled or sponsors wish to have them in the mix.

In some ways, this isn’t much different than life in 2024 for the Tour’s lowest earners; the series of Signature Events makes it difficult for many players, even those with full-time status, to earn spots in some of the tour’s early season events.

For non-PGA Tour members, the same paths to a Tour card still exist, but the math has gotten a little more complicated.

4. Who came up with these ideas?

The ideas came from the PGA Tour’s 16-member Players Advisory Council — think of it as the House of Representatives — based on feedback from the Tour membership. They were then sent to the Policy Board – actually the Senate again Top branches – for approval, which is where the Monday evening rubber stamp came from.

5. Why is the Tour suddenly so concerned about developing a “competition brand”?

Change is the way of the world in professional sports. Those who accept them go forward, and those who do not wither on the vine.

LIV is a spark of the revolutionary fire that has come to the Tour in the last few years, helping to start the internal conversations that have created many changes in the world of professional golf, including these. However, these changes are more internally driven than the turf-protecting changes that came before them, such as the creation of Signature Events, limited fields and larger bag sizes.

In short, LIV’s success informed the Tour that changes had to be made. Players and new investment groups like Strategic Sports Group have provided feedback on what those changes could look like. And now, with the consent of the (many) parties involved, changes are allowed to make the Tour always interesting and competitive.

Although these changes may to hear serious, the Tour is not alone in making structural changes to its competing product. Major League Baseball is perhaps the best comparison. MLB has experimented with many of its organization’s marquees over the past decade, and has produced major changes (the sound clock, new turnover rules, etc.) that have renewed fan interest despite early outrage. That’s what the Tour expects here.

6. What do we mean by “competitive product”?

We mean the importance of top-to-bottom, start-to-finish, day-to-day fun and professional excellence on the PGA Tour. Thursday and Friday rounds that often fail to end on Thursday and Friday – as was the case in 2024 – represent the underperformance that Tourse players looked to as evidence of change.