The PGA Tour Policy Board is set to vote on changes to its competitive structure, all of which are “terrible,” according to Lucas Glover.
Former U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover continues to express his displeasure with the pending changes coming to the PGA Tour.
This proposal, which the PGA Tour Policy Board will vote to approve on Nov. 18, will diminish field sizes, reduce membership, and eliminate most Monday qualifiers, among other things.
So two weeks after calling this “complete crap” on Sirius XM Radio, Glover once again slammed it in an interview with Adam Schupak of Golfweek.
“I think it’s terrible,” Glover said.
“And then hiding behind pace of play, I think challenges our intelligence. They think we’re stupid.”
Glover contends that PGA Tour pros have become much slower nowadays compared to when he first started more than two decades ago. He also believes the tour fails to enforce slow play properly, a problem that has plagued professional golf for years.
“The fact that the PGA Tour is hiding behind the guys who play slowly to change the field sizes… that’s complete crap,” Glover said on Sirius XM Radio on Nov. 5.
“How about speed up play? How about having a better policy?”
Because so many players finish their rounds after dark—or the following morning—the tour has decided to diminish field sizes to try and avoid this issue altogether. But Glover contends that this is slapping a band-aid on the issue and that the tour should enforce slow play policies instead.
“You get a better pace of play policy or enforce the one you have better,” Glover said.
“If I’m in a slow twosome and an official came up and said, ‘You guys are behind, this is not a warning, y’all are on the clock, and if you get a bad time, that’s a shot penalty,’ guess who’s running to their ball? That’s what we need to be doing.”
Yet, according to PGA Tour Chief Referee Gary Young, the solution is not docking players strokes on the course but instead creating greater intervals between tee times. More gaps between tee times lead to others being eliminated, and therefore, players are squeezed out, hence the smaller field sizes.
“We asked ourselves in the [Player Advisory Council] meetings if we were starting the Tour from scratch what would be our maximum field size?” Young said.
“As we talked it through with the players on that subcommittee, there was agreement in the room that you would never build it so that groups would be turning and waiting at the turn. So that’s where the whole idea of 144 being our maximum field size, everyone felt that that was the right number, and the mathematics on it worked. You’ll see that some of our other fields have been reduced even further, and that’s due to time constraints.
“So a great example is we play a field size of 144 players at The Players Championship, and there’s not enough daylight for 144 players. But we always placed an emphasis on starts for members, trying to maximize the number of starts they could get in a season, and sometimes, unfortunately, it was at the detriment of everyone else in the tournament. Now we looked at it from strictly how many hours of daylight do we have, and what’s the proper field size for each event on Tour. So we went straight by sunrise and sunset building in about three hours between the waves, which is what you need. And then that gives the afternoon wave some room to run, they’re not starting out right behind the last group making the turn and backing up. So we think that we’ve done a nice job building the schedule and finally getting all the field sizes correct for the future.”
But Glover does not buy that one bit.
He’s not alone, either. Many other pros, including Justin Lower and other journeymen on the outside periphery of stardom, feel this way, too. And yet, the PGA Tour knows it has to cater to its stars, such as Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, and Rory McIlroy, while catering to its broadcast partners and sponsors. That’s the biggest reason why Signature Events came to be: to get all the top players competing side-by-side. But these proposals for 2026 are being implemented for similar reasons, too.
Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Be sure to check out @_PlayingThrough for more golf coverage. You can follow him on Twitter @jack_milko as well.
