The possibility of a leaner, meaner PGA Tour has piqued a generational curiosity from players who forged their path to the game’s biggest stage during a vastly different era.
Tiger Woods recently hinted at rumors that the Tour and its new CEO, Brian Rolapp, are moving toward a schedule with fewer events and smaller fields. One of Rolapp’s three “governing principles” for the future competition committee, which Woods chairs, is scarcity.
“The scarcity thing is something that I know scares a lot of people, but I think that if you have scarcity at a certain level, it will be better because it will drive more eyes because there will be less time,” Woods said at the Hero World Challenge. “But don’t forget the golfing year is long. So there’s other opportunities and other places around the world or other places to play that can be created and have events. So there’s a scarcity side of it that’s not as scary as people might think.”
While Woods emphasized there are no specifics yet for a potentially scaled back Tour schedule, the “less is more” approach raises legitimate questions about the pathway many players have taken to reach the circuit. That path could be dramatically narrowed if not cut off entirely.
Tom Lehman, who played his way onto the Tour via what’s now the Korn Ferry Tour, remembers finishing first on the secondary circuit’s money list in 1991.
“It gave me a fully exempt position, which was the best part about it because there was no reshuffle,” Lehman recalled this week at the PNC Championship.
Under the current system, the Korn Ferry Tour remains the most robust pathway to the PGA Tour with the season’s top 20 players earning cards. But if the PGA Tour’s schedule is trimmed — some estimate it could be reduced from 38 events in 2025 to as few as 20 or 25 tournaments — that traditional climb could become steeper.
“It seems like a lot tougher path. I don’t know a lot about it, but it seems like the opportunity to be on the outside and getting in is more difficult,” Lehman said. “I think the opportunity to prove how good you are is shrinking. I’ve always believed that more players is better than fewer players, that way if you get that opportunity you can take advantage of it. But if you reduce the opportunity, it’s going to be more difficult to be that guy.”
The Tour has already tightened its belt this year. The top 100 players from the season-ending points list will earn full status in 2026, down from the top 125. The number of fully-exempt spots from the Korn Ferry Tour was reduced from 30 to 20, and the cards available via Q-School was trimmed to the top-5 finishers, not the top-5 finishers and ties.
If the Tour moves toward fewer events with smaller fields, these pathways might need to be trimmed again.
Stewart Cink, who also earned his PGA Tour status via the Korn Ferry Tour, has a different perspective.
“By shrinking the Tour to a smaller number of tournaments, I don’t think that changes the way to get on the Tour, you’re still going to have players leaving the Tour and you’re still going to have to replace them,” Cink said.
“The only way it becomes more difficult, other than just the quality of the players you’re playing against just gets better and better, is if they shrink the number of [available] spots and just squeeze that, which they’ve already done by shrinking from 125 to 100 [on the PGA Tour]. If they continue to make everything small then that, naturally, would also get smaller.”
For players from Cink and Lehman’s generation, playing your way onto the Tour via Q-School or the Korn Ferry Tour was essentially the only option. That’s why any potential changes would be scrutinized. But that doesn’t mean Rolapp’s vision isn’t shared by many veterans.
“Maybe not as much [of a pathway],” Mark O’Meara conceded before adding, “I do think over the years that there was almost too much golf. When you look at golf it’s almost a 12-month-a-year game with all these different tours. It never stops. Most major sports have a big break, so people are hungry to watch.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to cut back, [but] I don’t think I’d cut back that much.”
Whether or not there are cuts in store for the Tour is unclear, but for players from previous eras, the circuit’s future could look vastly different than the one they knew.
