We had the Tour Championship last month. Then we saw the Amgen Irish Open. Last week, the BMW PGA Championship and the Procore Championship were held at the same time on either side of the Atlantic. In the coming days, we’ll have the Ryder Cup. In hindsight, it might look like a fan feast. Back-to-back events, marquee players on the ground, so much at stake. But in actuality, it is nothing more than chaos.

There are simply too many events on the PGA Tour, DP World Tour, LIV Golf, and the Korn Ferry Tour combined. And in reality, they chase too few fans, television windows, cause player fatigue, fan confusion, and a fractured structure. It requires a radical solution urgently at this point, and new CEO Brian Rolapp should consider this, among other issues.

On the Fried Egg Golf Podcast, Brendon Porath and Andy Johnson discussed the same. They offered a quick, although controversial fix: absorb the DP World Tour into the PGA Tour and create a tiered global system similar to that of Formula 1’s F1 and F2.

“Why don’t at this point…you just absorb the European Tour?” they ask. “And then from there, you have all the players and you’re able to create like a really nice up and down system between the Korn Ferry, European tour, and you could create a cohesive schedule where you know these big worldwide events, the points all relate,” says Johnson.

Just this year, the PGA Tour added a ninth signature event with a $20 million purse and no cut, and this adds more on the back of a sport already breaking with load.

James Hahn, when he heard about it, said, “An extra signature event without a title sponsor. This is a joke, right?”

This argument is simple. Right now, the PGA Tour is not making any real concessions to its so-called “strategic alliance” partner in Europe. But, it increased its ownership stake in European Tour Productions from 15% to 40%. So, the DPWT has arguably and effectively become a feeder circuit for the PGA Tour despite CEO Keith Pelley’s denials. And it has limited influence on the overall schedule. Events like the French Open carry no meaningful weight in PGA Tour standings.

As Johnson puts it, “Michael Kim goes over and wins the French Open. It gives him some sort of like bump in his standing on the PGA Tour, which right now it doesn’t.”

The proposed model would formalize what is already happening in practice. It will keep the PGA Tour at the top, DPWT in the middle would act as a competitive tier, and Korn Ferry at the developmental entry level for aspiring pros. Players could move up and down between these levels depending on their performance, while also giving global events genuine relevance.

“I think it’s a sensible I think we do need some sort of consolidation and unification here and maybe it’s like F1 and F2, you know, this is F2 or something like that,” suggests Porath.

But there is also another problem: scheduling. The PGA Tour currently runs 39 tournaments from January to August. The DPWT hosts 42, LIV Golf adds 14 more and then there’s also the Korn Ferry Tour with 26. That’s more than 95 professional tournaments a year! Rory McIlroy has already flagged this as unsustainable, saying: “I think 47 or 50 tournaments a year is definitely too many.” Jordan Spieth also highlighted the toll of the schedule on mental and physical health. He recalled how eight tournaments in 10 weeks during the 2023 Masters left him mentally drained. Recently, Jake Knapp also delivered a scathing assessment of the same idea.

There is the involvement of money as well. Sig event winners can pocket $3.6 to $4 million, whereas champions in regular tournaments earn roughly half that. So, combined with oversaturation, this incentivizes top players to cherry-pick events, which affects competitive equity. Fans, meanwhile, experience fatigue from too many options, and television ratings decline (PGA Tour final-round broadcasts average 17.78 times more viewers than LIV Golf ). All this only raises the uncomfortable truth that the DPWT may have missed its chance to remain truly independent.

By aligning with the PGA Tour against LIV, it became more dependent instead of stronger. “They screwed up,” Johnson says.

Meanwhile, there are other solutions too for this broken system.

Other alternative solutions

Beyond full consolidation, insiders and players have floated alternative ways to fix golf’s scheduling chaos. One of them – if the PGA Tour could focus exclusively on marquee “signature events” while building natural breaks into the calendar. Then, during those breaks, the DP World Tour and Korn Ferry Tour could fill complementary slots. The DPWT’s winter-heavy schedule in the Middle East, South Africa, and Australia is especially suited for this. It will offer prime-time golf when the PGA Tour would otherwise be idle.

“These signature events and everything else gets rebranded as almost like challenge events that earn spots,” Andy Johnson ideates.

Europe could also host “coffee golf” in the fall for the US morning audience before the NFL season dominates. And the PGA Tour could relaunch in February at Pebble Beach instead of Hawaii. Rory McIlroy has also advocated for a similar principle from a different angle, suggesting that the PGA Tour cut back on overall tournaments to create scarcity like the NFL, which runs just 17 games in 18 weeks. Brian Rolapp can definitely help in this, as he has worked with the NFL before. Echoing the same sentiment, Billy Horschel had said, “We need to go away for a little bit. We need to go away, have some anticipation, let people be excited to get us back.”

And Rolapp on the helm, changes are coming for sure, but will they help structure the Tour better or not is the question.