ATLANTA, GEORGIA | The 2020s have arguably been the most volatile era in golf’s history, and the midpoint of the decade saw a nearly universal leadership upheaval. Other than Fred Ridley maintaining the helm at Augusta National Golf Club, pretty much every other key organization has a new chief.
The DP World Tour started the turnover wave last year with Guy Kinnings taking over as CEO for Keith Pelley. Mark Darbon accepted the reins for the R&A last summer from Martin Slumbers and made a good impression in his first Open Championship last month. In January, Scott O’Neil assumed the role of CEO at LIV Golf, inheriting everything Greg Norman left him.
Trevor Immelman is now shepherding the Official World Golf Ranking and has a new LIV Golf application in hand. Derek Sprague took the PGA of America helm after the steady reign of Seth Waugh. Craig Kessler was selected to be the 10th commissioner of the LPGA in May.
But the biggest chief executive splash started in June, with the PGA Tour hiring Brian Rolapp away from the NFL to be its new CEO, with commissioner Jay Monahan set to step down next year after helping the transition. Rolapp has already created a buzz with his direct style and his willingness to take big swings to reshape the PGA Tour’s future.
“I like him. I like him a lot,” said Rory McIlroy, one of the 20 or so players Rolapp has already sat down with to get to know during his whirlwind onboarding process. “I like that he doesn’t come from golf. I like that he doesn’t have any preconceived ideas of what golf should look like or what the tour should look like. I think he’s going to bring a fresh perspective to everything, and I think he wants to move pretty quick, so I’m excited.”
Rolapp takes over a PGA Tour that’s on the upswing. The 2025 season concluded on Sunday with a popular new FedEx Cup champion, Tommy Fleetwood, and all eyes now look ahead to the Ryder Cup in September and a 2026 season that promises some big changes:
BIRDIE: Fleetwood. The 34-year-old Englishman’s greatest successes had all come representing Europe – seven DP World Tour wins, and Ryder Cup heroics as part of “Moliwood” in 2018 in Paris and clinching the 2023 cup in Rome. Otherwise he held the reputation of golf’s biggest bridesmaid: 2024 Olympic silver medalist, seven near-misses in majors including two runner-ups, a record 30 top-five finishes (12 of them top-three and six runner-ups) on the PGA Tour without a win. He endured two of his most painful near-misses this summer, losing late two-shot leads in the Travelers Championship to Keegan Bradley and the FedEx St. Jude Championship playoff opener to Justin Rose. He erased all that with a three-shot victory at East Lake that earned him two trophies including the FedEx Cup. Fleetwood handled it all with impeccable grace and kept banging on the door. Good guys do sometimes finish first.
MOMENT OF THE YEAR: The Masters. Not sure we will soon see a more meaningful moment than Rory McIlory’s relieved scream and fall to his knees in tears after one of the most volatile days in golf history that exorcised 11 years of frustration and fulfilled his biggest goal of owning a green jacket and joining five other immortals in the career slam fraternity.
PLAYER OF THE YEAR: Scottie Scheffler. When Rory McIlroy is in full flight, it’s hard to think there could possibly be a greater golfer in the world. But there is. Scheffler’s play doesn’t have the drama in it that McIlroy’s does, but he simply has no flaws and just seems inevitably to be part of the story every week he plays. His hole-out pitch to clinch the BMW Championship was an exclamation point on a season with two majors. His career Grand Slam will get here sooner rather than later.
WHIFF OF THE YEAR 1: PIF deal. Despite enlisting the power of the White House as leverage, the PGA Tour failed to strike a deal with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which bankrolls LIV Golf, to reunite the professional game. Negotiations completely fell apart and have been nonexistent since early spring. The likelihood of a deal ever happening seems remote. This is just what the golf world is now. It’s too bad for the handful of guys on LIV who people care about.
WHIFF OF THE YEAR 2: PGA of America. The new leadership in Frisco, Texas, is fixated on the ball rollback – an issue that will have pretty much zero effect on its club pros and recreational golfers who will still buy and use golf balls just as much as always and barely notice any difference. But when asked to address tariffs – which are already having a profound and potentially devastating effect on manufacturers, retailers and consumers – they were essentially mute.
COMEBACK PLAYER OF THE YEAR: J.J. Spaun. Technically you probably needed to be there in the first place in order to come back, and Spaun’s pre-2025 career was as rank-and-file as it gets – he needed 147 career starts before winning the 2022 Valero Texas Open. Spaun felt his career was all but done in the summer of 2024 when he was outside the top 150 and on the verge of losing his card before top-10 finishes in his final two events salvaged his status. At 35, he produced a season for the ages with a U.S. Open victory and playoff losses at the Players and the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR: Luke Clanton. The tour’s rookie-of-the-year award will probably come down to tournament winners Aldrich Potgieter (at 20 the youngest player on tour) or Ryan Gerard. But the PGA Tour University Accelerated graduate and former amateur No. 1 from Florida State spent time inside the OWGR top 100 for his pro results as an amateur. It hasn’t come as easy since he took up his card, but he might find his stride in the fall.
BIRDIE: Keegan Bradley. His reboot is a work of art after he was so prominently snubbed by Zach Johnson and left off the Ryder Cup team in 2023. The PGA of America made up for it with the shocking announcement of the now 39-year-old as U.S. captain for Bethpage, and all Bradley has done is potentially play his way into a justifiable role as the first playing captain since Arnold Palmer in 1963. Whether he plays or delegates his spot to someone else, he deserves a fairy-tale ending in New York.
DNP: Bursted bubble. Bradley should only ask one question of his vice captain Jim Furyk tonight: would he pick him if he was the captain? If the answer is yes, somebody arguably deserving is going to get the terrible call Keegan got in 2023. Frankly, it probably should be Collin Morikawa, but it won’t be. The guess here is Sam Burns’ putter gets the nod tomorrow over Ben Griffin if Bradley decides to play.
BOGEY: Moody media. What started with Morikawa saying he didn’t “owe” the people who cover the game anything after ditching interview requests when he blew the Arnold Palmer Invitational spread into a mild epidemic of attitude from players choosing not to talk after bad days or finishes. It’s not new, and they shouldn’t be required to talk, but it’s always a better move to speak even when it’s not comfortable. See Tommy Fleetwood.
BIRDIE: Cameron Young. It took him four full seasons too long to finally put the winning pieces together in the regular season-ending Wyndham Championship, but it was a very timely time to break through with a likely pick for the Ryder Cup as his ultimate reward. It helped that Young went from being one of the tour’s worst putters in 2023-24 to one of its 10 best in 2025. Much like David Duval, who took a frustratingly long time to break through himself, Young may quickly become elite.
BIRDIE: Maiden winners. Young is one of 12 players to win for the first time in 38 PGA Tour events in 2025 – four of them rookies (Aldrich Potgieter, Karl Vilips, William Mouw and Ryan Gerard) and three of them doing it twice (Griffin, Ryan Fox and Brian Campbell). The others were Thomas Detry, Joe Highsmith, Min Woo Lee and Andrew Novak.
BOGEY: Scheduling. Like 2026 really needed another exclusive signature event cluttering up the middle of the schedule, but the PGA Tour capitulated to the American president’s demand and ego to add a ninth limited-field tournament right in the middle of the majors’ grind. It will return to Doral’s Blue Monster for an as-yet unsponsored $20 million event a decade after abandoning it as a WGC venue presumably because it had no sponsor. “An extra signature event without a title sponsor at a course owned by the president. This is a joke, right?” James Hahn told Golfweek. There will be three signature events and two majors in six weeks from the Masters to the PGA. Absurd!
BIRDIE: Ratings. CBS Sports reported that 2025 was its most-watched golf season in seven years, averaging 2.969 million viewers for golf broadcasts – up 17 percent from 2024 and its highest mark since 2018. Ratings across the board have rebounded since NBC and CBS suffered in 2024 with a year-on-year drop of 15 percent. Meanwhile, LIV Golf still hasn’t caught on at all with Fox. The PGA Tour has won the battle for the hearts and minds of American golf viewers.
PAR: Rickie Fowler. His late-season surge pulled him from outside the FedEx Cup top 90 at the start of June to very nearly reaching the Tour Championship. His T6 and T7 in the first two playoff events were confidence-boosting for the soon-to-be 37-year-old, but his double bogey on the 15th Sunday at Caves Valley cost him a spot at East Lake and major exemptions for 2026.
BOGEY: Frederik Kjettrup. After finishing eighth in PGA Tour University at Florida State and receiving PGA Tour Americas status, the gifted Dane became the first player to win three times on the 2024 Canada swing to earn immediate Korn Ferry Tour membership and full KFT exemption through 2025. He threw that away to sign with the Cleeks on LIV Golf, where he failed to finish better than 30th or earn a single decimal point to lose his card via relegation. Now the 25-year-old has nowhere to play in 2026.
BOGEY: Jordan Spieth. As high as 38th in FedEx Cup points after the Memorial, the three-time major winner suffered through a desultory summer and fell from 48th to 54th after the FedEx St. Jude playoff opener – thus losing guaranteed access to the now nine signature events in 2026. He’ll get plenty of sponsor invites, so don’t feel too sorry for him. But it’s disappointing nonetheless.
BOGEY: Max Homa. It’s painful to see how far Homa – one of the tour’s good guys – has fallen, from No. 7 in the world at the start of 2024 to No. 116 currently. He still has a tour for 2026, and most people would hope the 34-year-old American finds something to get his mojo back.