Pga Tour Confidential

Henry: The Super Bowl moves around every year. Why can't the FedEx Cup playoffs move around? Why couldn't, say, Hartford and the BMW Championship switch spots on the calendar for a year?

Van Sickle: That's pretty radical.

Henry: Well, a lot of sponsors and communities have supported the Tour for years. Let everyone have a chance to host a playoff event, not just the same cities every year.

Love: I'd make the Nationwide tour bigger, make it the way to get to the regular Tour instead of qualifying school. I'd take some of the PGA Tour's weaker events and make them major Nationwide events. That would strengthen the other tour and shorten our schedule.

Flesch: Yeah, I've heard talk that Q school might become the way you get on the Nationwide, and that a separate qualifier would be held for players who lost their cards and for Nationwide players to move up to the PGA Tour. So the only road to the PGA Tour would go through the Nationwide.

Purdy: I'd increase the fields at all the big-dollar events. The bigger, the better. Our best event is the Players, with 144 players and a $9.5 million purse. They got it right with that one. Everybody says the Players has the strongest field of the year. Why limit the fields at the World Golf Championships to 60 or 70 players? Someone like Sergio García, who can get hot and win at any time, may miss them because he dropped out of the top 50 in the World Ranking.

Flesch: I totally agree. The WGC fields should be bigger—at least 120 players. And I'd add a cut so they're not freebies anymore. It's too easy for guys to shoot six or eight over par for 72 holes and still pick up their $50,000. These events skew the money lists and the rankings for the top players. They make it way too easy to maintain a top 50 ranking without playing all that well.

Van Sickle: If you add a cut, some top international players might quit coming.

Flesch: Yes, but if you want to stay up in the ranking, you'd have to play. There are too many ranking points at stake. Plus, the real problem is that the WGC events have helped make it too easy for players to reach the minimum number of events. We don't require our stars to play enough to carry the rest of the PGA Tour. That's why the Tour is downsizing, that's why the Fall Series will go away and why the Tour will downsize even more. It's going to get harder for the not-so-big stars to survive.

Van Sickle: The WGC events have diminished the importance of regular Tour stops.