While personally I am disgusted to anyone who sells their souls to the Saudis, the oft-mentioned reason given by the pro golfers is that they don’t want to play a tournament every week of the year. Fair enough too, given that high performance athletes need breaks, and people who have earned 10s of millions might feel like they deserve breaks.

Yet, for golf especially, where results of the even the top players can be very uneven, the more tournaments there are means better data to work out who – on average – is the best. We know that the #1 player can go all year without actually winning…

The thing is, to get the maximum ranking points, you need to play 20 tournaments per year. One you factor in that they last 4 days (if you make the cut), and there are important practise rounds. Pro-Ams are on Wed, so the tournament is actually Mon-Sun, 7 days. Add one day for travelling and you can see why 20 tournaments is the most you would want to play…

Once you appear in 20+ tournaments, the average result of all of those is used for your rank. Results are used for your rank for the following 2 years, and they throw in recency bias as well. The major tournaments are worth more points, because they know that everyone will be there.

There is a solution, although it makes it harder for the average fan to understand.

• Reduce the required tournaments to 10 (the negative being that fans get to watch the stars less often, potentially)
• Base the weighting of tournament scores based on the average rank of who plays in it

Two things will happen:

Players will play as often as they want, so no more complaining. Quite likely the money, and the need to actually have tournament fitness, will mean they mostly keep the same schedule as they currently do.

There will be more variety in who plays which tournament. Lower ranked players can choose between lofty ambitions or achievable goals, as they already can do with the different tours (same goes for tennis).

The top players will trend towards the prize money more, tournaments that suit their majors preparation more, and tournaments that will get them the most points more.

Somehow or other, the top players will cluster more in the same tournaments than they do now. They will evolve things, not the PGA.