PGA Tour's own March Madness dilemma is almost here

Brian Rolapp addresses the room during a press conference at the Players Championship in March.Getty Images

The other news of the week — in the greater sports world, at least — had nothing to do with Saudi funding, but rather with TV funding. The kind paid for with your eyeballs and your ability to change between four different channels one week a year.

We’re talking about March Madness.

Even as other real, significant pro basketball playoff games are playing out in multiple leagues across the country, our gazes have shifted back towards — you guess it — money. There is a forthcoming plan (which is reportedly a lock to get approved) to expand the NCAA tournament from 68 teams to 76, doing so by adding new games to the Tuesday-Wednesday pre-tournament false start of everyone’s favorite tournament. The emphasis, for now and as long as it lasts, is on everyone. This tourney has had, at least for my entire sports-watching life, the same approval rating as puppies.

But adding eight teams to the dance is not about making college seniors feel better toward the end of their athletic careers, nor is it about the simple premise that if some of what you love is good, more is better. It is about commercial inventory. There once was a 64-team tournament with 63 games on 10 days of basketball. For a decade it was 65 teams, 64 games and 11 days. Then it grew to 68 teams and 67 games across 12 days and nights. Soon it will be 76, 75 and 12. Is there any reason to think that 96, 95 and 16 be coming in 2032?

How this relates to golf is the same way all professional (or rather, professionalized) sports relate. You sit down to watch and those in charge of the action hope it holds your attention for a while, while occasionally the broadcaster is paid by sponsors to temporarily interrupt that attention with advertisements. The broadcaster weighs that money against what it cost them to pay the governing body — in this case the NCAA — for the broadcasting rights. It’s a relatively simple formula, but when it works the numbers call for something more complex: more games and more inventory.

Right now, pro golf has a mess of inventory. It covers your weekend mornings on the DP World Tour, streamed across Golf Channel. PGA Tour afternoons are beamed over on NBC or CBS. It has existed on the CW and Fox Sports for LIV Golf. And yes, the ultimate sickos have their Thursday and Friday early-round viewing (or watchalong bet-a-thons) via ESPN’s digital streamer. There’s the women’s game, on TV more this year than ever. And the seniors, who anchor plenty of Golf Channel airtime. And the simulator golf on Monday and Tuesday nights…and so on. One could barely imagine more pro golf TV inventory, but then TV executives went nostalgia hunting and found a buyer for the Skins Game on Amazon.

The reason the PGA Tour has been roiled for years by discourse about its product and competitive structure is that it all seemed to be coming up short of its true potential. (At least partially proven by the threat posed by LIV Golf.) It felt good-not-great when the culmination of the PGAT season looked the same as the tournaments in March and the same as the tournaments in June. Surely more could be squeezed out of televising the best golfers on the planet so frequently?

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Bryson DeChambeau of the Crushers GC and Jon Rahm of Legion XIII and Cameron Smith of Ripper GC walk down the 1st during day one of LIV Adelaide

And so comes the reality of all sports programming: There is good inventory and there is not-so-good inventory. No one knows this more than the man who once had to sell a TV package that included Titans-Jaguars in primetime. Enter PGA Tour CEO and ex-NFL No. 2 Brian Rolapp.

Determining the difference between good inventory and not-so-good has been the central focus of Rolapp’s first year as PGA Tour CEO. He has to create better, more efficient, more engaging inventory, and was largely hired for his ability to do so, after succeeding for 22 years with the NFL. The PGA Tour (and golf) is spread thin right now, fighting tiny wars on many fronts. Tour Traditionalists vs. Tour Investors; Journeymen vs. Superstars; time-honored tournaments vs. profit-and-loss sheets. Unsurprisingly, Rolapp tasked Theo Epstein with playing a significant role in the Future Competitions Committee (FCC). Epstein was one of the chief consultants telling baseball owners and the talent they employ, perhaps counterintuitively, that a decrease in inventory of Time Spent at Ballpark could incite a greater experience for fans, juicing the popularity of this country’s once-beloved pastime. It worked, and there is belief something similar could work in pro golf, though it will look much different.

If the current Tour structure is 12 or 13 Tier A events and 29 or so Tier B events — majors and Ryder Cup are not included — which aggregates to a total pot of roughly $1 billion in annual TV revenue, Rolapp’s model will look more like the following:

-22 Tier A events (improved with cuts, 120 players and very limited access)

-18 Tier B events (with bigger purses than the Korn Ferry Tour)

-A few intangibles (we can call this “C”) we can’t fully account for yet. Tweaks like match play in the Tour Championship and increased stakes via harsher promotion and relegation. New-ish things that can coerce interest from TV partners.

Rolapp and (most of) his FCC have decided that there is clearly good inventory worth chasing and there is not-so-good inventory that they will try and better commercialize without completely kicking it to the curb (See: the plight of pro golf in Hawaii).

The dicey-ness arrives when you go to your old broadcast pals and say, The menu is different and it’s better than ever! while they’ve been enjoying the same meal at the same table for decades with swapped appetizers but few real changes. What will they think?

Let’s reconsider, then, what the inventory pursuit of March Madness means for viewers. Nothing about the in-game experience is likely to change. TV timeouts will still exist every four minutes of game time. They’ve always been long enough for a bathroom break. Coaches will not receive any more timeouts. They’ll still hold them for the end of the game. The inventory of advertisements will not increase during those Thursday and Friday marathons when we all call in “sick” for work. The inventory add in this case is more akin to a new front porch tacked on to the same old house, threatening some of the charm, perhaps, but squeezing more money out of the future buyers after an assessment. (What that means for the sanctity of the tournament, you can read about on other websites.) But pro golf is not going to do anything like that. Instead it is going to alter its competitive model so much — to pull on the previous analogy, refining, redesigning the house’s basement, perhaps even intentionally downsizing — that the price to own it will increase. Increased costs for broadcasters don’t always benefit the league or governing body, because broadcasters (especially in golf) have a tough track record of passing those costs down to TV viewers.

That’s the other push-pull here, an old story at this point, that increased TV rights in golf have caused broadcasters to force more commercials into the TV viewing experience. It has caused more interruptions of action like Playing Through, where the action is muted and pushed into a tinier frame while a noisy ad plays on the majority of the screen. Even the Masters broadcast — long heralded for its devotion to the viewing experience — was criticized this year for what appeared to be an increase in commercialization.

Sports inventory and the commercialization of that inventory (more, and more, and more) feels like the story of the 2020s, as College Football turned its playoff from 4 teams to 12 to, inevitably, 16. As the NFL added a 17th game and set its sights on an 18th — while selling exclusive rights to certain preseason games to YouTube. As the World Cup saw a 32-team tournament in one country and decided it would rather have a 48-team tournament across three countries. Perhaps the story of the 2030s will be parsing through what parts of that inventory strayed too far.

As for the PGA Tour’s inventory? The goal is clearly to course-correct early, to plan for the future, to make its existing inventory so good that buyers won’t even bother to consider how its paid for. I’ll understand if you’re a skeptic. But I’m optimistic as I squint through the LIV Golf rubble at the date on the calendar when Rolapp promised he’d have more to share. June’s Travelers Championship, just eight weeks away. Another big tournament where we’ll have plenty else to talk about.

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