A Proposal for the PGA Tour & Thoughts on Recent Gambling Suspensions
A Proposal to Improve the PGA Tour Product
Lessons can be learned from the explosion of podcasts & newsletters in recent years. An obvious lesson is that media consumption patterns have migrated online. The internet enables convenient, affordable access into the brains of world experts on niche subjects. People enjoy that access. It’s an intuitive, predictable insight.
Another key insight derived from paying attention to successful podcasts & newsletters is that the human brain finds satisfaction in consistency. For example, you would probably prefer that this newsletter hits your inbox at the same time on the same day on a consistent cadence. That might not be true of all of you, but it is true on net.
It all boils down to setting expectations and delivering on those expectations. When you like to consume something and know that it will be available at a particular time, you integrate it into your routine. If you expect something and it fails to show up, it runs the risk of eluding your attention span.
By definition, the most popular live sports leagues are the leagues for which we’re most inclined to set aside time. The only way to consume sporting events live is if people integrate them into their routines.
The NFL does a tremendous job of building its product into fans’ routines by delivering a high-quality product consistently and on a familiar cadence. As a passionate consumer of the product, I know that from September-January, I can watch a compelling group of football games on Sunday afternoons and an exciting, well-produced primetime game on Thursday, Sunday, and Monday nights. On Thanksgiving Day, I know that I can watch three thoughtfully-curated NFL games. And I know with certainty that one of those games will feature the Dallas Cowboys every year. There’s no doubt that the popularity of the Dallas Cowboys can be partially attributed to this tradition. Human beings like patterns and consistency.
The NBA is the most recent league to lean into this philosophy. Historically, NBA fans have known they can expect to watch basketball games from late October through June with an All-Star Weekend breaking up the season into two parts. And as is tradition, basketball fans can expect a slate of star-studded games on Christmas Day.
Well starting this year, the NBA is introducing a new ritual to fans of their product. They’ve launched an in-season tournament, the NBA Cup. Without diving into every single detail, the NBA has divided all 30 teams into groups. Group stage games count both towards a team’s regular season win total and towards qualifying for the NBA Cup. The group stage games take place on Tuesday and Friday nights in November. The Finals of the NBA Cup will take place on December 9th.
See what the NBA is doing? Without fundamentally changing their core product, the league is offering fans another option to fold into their routine. Now fans know that they can expect regular season games October-April, group stage play on Tuesday and Friday nights in November, an in-season tournament in early December, Christmas Day basketball, an All-Star Break, and post-season basketball April-June. Without increasing the number of total games on the schedule, the NBA increased the number of meaningful games. Is it going to work? We’ll find out. But it’s worth a shot.
The PGA Tour should follow suit.
In the past, the PGA Tour schedule featured a collection of 40+ events per year. Despite wide variations in the quality of each tournament, the tour sort of tried to pretend like each tournament was equally important. Starting this season, the PGA Tour is explicitly moving away from that paradigm. This PGA Tour season marks the beginning of the Signature Events model, a structure that elevates certain events above others. Fans can expect the top players on the PGA Tour to show up to the Signature Events. The flip side of the coin is that fans should not expect many top PGA Tour players to show up to non-Signature Events. There are zero Signature Events in the months from September-December, known as the “fall swing.” The fall swing is now mostly about determining players’ status levels on the PGA Tour, and top finishers from the fall swing will earn spots into a couple of Signature Events next year.
I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that the PGA Tour fall swing isn’t exactly must-see tv. Personally, I enjoy watching some fall PGA Tour golf, but it is also my job and I am highly invested in the outcomes of the tournaments. I’m in the minority. Most people aren’t paying any attention to the fall swing.
Per SportsTvRatings.com, 156,000 people watched the final round of the Shriners Children’s Open on Golf Channel two weeks ago. It was the 56th most watched sports television program for that day. Professional bull riding, which aired on CBS during a similar time slot, had 10x the television audience.
The PGA Tour needed to transition to a model like the Signature Events model and give top players an offseason. So low viewership numbers on fall swing tournaments shouldn’t demoralize anyone. But the PGA Tour doesn’t have to vanish from relevance between September and December.
Here’s an idea for raising the profile of the PGA Tour in the fall.
Currently, the only PGA Tour players who are guaranteed spots in all Signature Events are those who finished in the top 50 in the previous PGA Tour season. What if we allocated two spots to the top two finishers in the Korn Ferry Tour Finals? And what if we shifted the Korn Ferry Tour schedule later into the year so that the final stretch of the Korn Ferry Tour season can be the highlight of the fall?
Note: For those who are unfamiliar, the Korn Ferry Tour is operated by the PGA Tour and it is the PGA Tour’s developmental league in an official capacity. The DP World Tour is the PGA Tour’s other developmental league in an unofficial but increasingly official capacity.
Players who finish in the top 30 on the Korn Ferry Tour get status into some PGA Tour events, but they don’t get status into Signature Events. They get status into the tournaments people aren’t really watching, like the Shriners Children’s Open. If we rewarded the top two finishers on the Korn Ferry Tour with guaranteed spots in all of the next season’s Signature Events, the Korn Ferry Tour Championship would be a much more compelling watch. Fans would want to familiarize themselves with the two new faces set to tee it up in all the Signature Events.
I’d also change the format of the Korn Ferry Tour Finals so that it is more entertaining. The tournaments in the table above don’t provide the most thrilling season-end format. I’d probably aim for a three-tournament postseason where eventually the top eight golfers compete in a single elimination match play bracket for two spots in Signature Events. If you win the final match, you get into Signature Events and earn like $1,000,000. If you finish runner up, you get a much smaller cash prize, but you’re still into the Signature Events. It’d be a fun tournament to watch.
I can hear some of you formulating objections to this proposal.
“But Joseph, you just said people aren’t watching the PGA Tour fall swing which offers spots into the Signature Events. Why would people watch Korn Ferry Tour golf?”
Well, respectfully, fans already know the PGA Tour players competing in the fall swing. Those golfers just played an entire lucrative season on the PGA Tour, and fans have a decent feel for how good those players are. Korn Ferry Tour players are less well-known, and they generally struggle financially. Watching two lesser-known players earn life-changing spots into Signature Events would be compelling. It’d be a fresh, different product from what PGA Tour fans are used to watching from January-August.
“But Joseph, if the Korn Ferry Tour season ends in like November, then the Korn Ferry Tour players who earn PGA Tour status won’t get to play in the PGA Tour fall swing and they’ll be behind in the points list!”
That, of course, is a solvable problem. The solution is the same solution I’ve written about many times. The PGA Tour needs two points lists:
One points list determines Playoff eligibility, and it only distributes points at Signature Events
One points list determines status on the PGA Tour. There’s a simple system that standardizes points across all PGA Tour sanctioned events. A point earned in a Korn Ferry Tour event would be in the same currency as a point earned in a PGA Tour event, for example.
Ok if you got a little lost in that explanation once I dove into the weeds of the professional golf schedule, that’s fine.
The key is to understand that in professional golf, people only watch the most competitive, meaningful tournaments; consequently, the pathways into those tournaments take on meaning. For instance, major championships are the most special tournaments in golf. People mostly watch other tournaments, like PGA Tour Signature Events, within the context of major championships. “Ok he won the Phoenix Open. That’s a huge step. Do you think he can contend at the Masters?”
Every calendar year, the PGA Tour seasons starts with momentum and runs out of juice in the middle of the summer. It starts to fall out of people’s routines. Once all four major championships have passed, tournaments don’t seem to have much meaning. The solution for the tour is to maximize how special its Signature Events are. Then, tournaments that offer spots into the Signature Events will elevate because fans will understand how special the Signature Events are. Giving two spots in Signature Events to the top two finishers on the Korn Ferry Tour could give the fall the identity that it lacks. This idea offers fans a fresh product to work into their routines. Now January-August is for major championships and Signature Events. The fall is for scouting the fresh faces on their way into the Signature Events.
Ok, Sharks, that’s my pitch.
Would this proposal be a smashing success? I don’t know. It’s just an idea. I don’t know if the NBA Cup will live up to the NBA’s expectations either. I do know that the current version of the PGA Tour product can be improved, and it’s worth experimenting with an idea like the one I’ve suggested. People would watch it. Eventually, that has to matter.
Oh and by the way, it’s “FindingTheEdge.substack.com”
That’s for some of you media outlets - you know who you are - to copy and paste when you magically write about a very similar idea in a couple months. It’ll be easier to credit me this time…
Gambling Suspensions
If one of your friends tells you they made a $5,000 bet on a sportsbook like DraftKings or FanDuel, you should give them a hard time. The joke isn’t that they are probably making a bad bet; the joke is that DraftKings/FanDuel takes their action. If you are a good gambler with a track record of making profitable bets, sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel wouldn’t take a $5,000 bet from you. They’d severely limit how much you can wager, which can be as low as like $50-$100. Next time one of your friends tells you they bet $5,000 on DraftKings, say “You know they limit winners, right?” They’ll think it’s hilarious.
Anyway, last week Vince India and Jake Staiano got suspended by the PGA Tour for betting on professional golf. In recent years, the PGA Tour has formed partnerships with gambling companies. They’ve implemented policies that strictly prohibit PGA Tour players from betting on professional golf tournaments. India and Staiano broke the policy and received a six-month suspension and a three-month suspension respectively.
Frankly, I’ve been pretty taken aback by the public reaction to the suspensions. A large group of people seem to think that the PGA Tour is being too harsh with the penalties or even hypocritical for partnering with gambling companies then suspending players for gambling. I think those people are missing the mark.
Sportsbooks track everything. They know which customers place smart bets. One of the ways sportsbooks identify sharp gamblers is by monitoring which bettors consistently get Closing Line Value (CLV). CLV is when the odds move in your favor between the time you place a bet and the time the event you bet on starts. For example, imagine that on Monday, October 30th I made a large bet on the Chicago Bears +7.5 points versus the New Orleans Saints. The game kicks off next Sunday, November 5th. If, between now and then, the spread moves to Chicago +6.5, I gained some Closing Line Value because I got action on Chicago at a better price than it closed. Markets are more efficient right before kickoff than they are seven days before kickoff. Thus, Closing Line Value is a decent measure of sharp betting.
Note: If you want to learn more about why markets are most efficient right before kickoff or why Closing Line Value matters, I’d recommend The Logic of Sports Betting. This is not an ad.
Sportsbooks have many tools at their disposal to measure your aptitude as a bettor. If they have determined that you are a super sharp gambler, they might move a line when you bet. If they think I’m sharp and I place a bet on the Bears at +7.5, they might immediately move the line to +7, for example. That’s part of why it’s so difficult to beat a sportsbook. Markets are pretty efficient, and when a sharp gambler places a bet because she has identified an inefficiency, the sportsbook can leverage the information her bet contains and adjust the price.
At the 2022 WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play, professional golfer Paul Casey was nursing a sore back. That wasn’t public information. He played two holes of his opening match versus Corey Conners before withdrawing due to the injury. Imagine if before teeing off, he’d said to another professional golfer on the range, “Eh, I’m going to give it a go but I don’t think I’ll make it through many holes.” Then imagine the player bets a bunch of money on Corey Conners to win the match, and the bet cashes when Casey withdraws. The main issue here isn’t really that the sportsbook lost money. The problem is that when the sportsbook received a huge bet on Corey Conners, they could have leveraged that info and adjusted the price to make Corey Conners a bigger favorite. Someone sitting at home without inside information might look at the new price, decide Paul Casey is undervalued, and bet on him to beat Corey Conners. When Paul Casey withdraws two holes into the round, that bettor is going to lose confidence in the fairness of the market. That’s bad for sportsbooks.
Vince India and Jake Staiano placed bets on professional golf. They broke the PGA Tour's policy. You can listen to Staiano’s account of what unfolded on the Any Given Monday pod here. As Staiano willingly admits, he made three small wagers on The Match between Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, a made-for-tv event in which Staiano almost assuredly had no inside information. Unfortunately for Staiano, whether or not he had inside information does not matter. The definition of inside information doesn’t even matter. Can professional golfers’ agents bet on professional golf? Can caddies? They might have inside information. The answer to those questions has nothing to do with the information those parties possess or the kind of bet that they want to place. The answer is whatever policy the gambling companies & the PGA Tour agreed upon.
I don’t want to sound unempathetic. I genuinely feel bad for Vince India and Jake Staiano. I felt bad for wide receiver Calvin Ridley when he got suspended by the NFL for an entire year(!) for betting on the NFL. But when you break a gambling policy, a sports league has no choice but to enact a tough punishment.
It might not seem fair. But sportsbooks are not concerned with fairness. They are concerned with the appearance of fairness. As soon as competitive integrity is called into question, people stop betting and the sportsbooks stop making money. If sportsbetting were purely concerned with integrity, they wouldn’t place limits on the small segment of customers who make profitable bets. Sportsbooks are concerned with making money, and one of their stipulations is that athletes can’t bet on their own sport. Those are the rules the PGA Tour agreed to when it decided to take money from the gambling industry.
Should the PGA Tour have partnered with gambling companies?
That’s a separate discussion. Partnerships with gambling companies come with trade-offs. I have concerns about gamblers yelling in players’ backswings when they’ve placed significant wagers against them. Those situations are going to happen. And I have concerns about messages like the one pro golfer Mike Lorenzo-Vera received this weekend.
The deals have been signed though. You can complain about the rules, but you still have to play by them.
Tennis Balls
As I’ve been getting more into professional tennis this year, I’ve been struck by the number of high-profile professional tennis players calling for better conditions. In particular, I’ve seen a number of players voice concerns about how often they must adjust to different tennis balls. Apparently adapting to new balls can cause injury. Novak Djokovic has weighed in on the matter a few different times. I always appreciate his thoughts.
Ben Shelton agrees.
That’ll be an interesting story to track.
Flag Plants
In case you’d like to root for or against me, I made these bets before the NBA season tipped off.
If these go well, we’ll probably talk about them in a future newsletter.
And if you’d like to bet with me or against me next weekend, I took the Chicago Bears +7.5 against the New Orleans Saints. Please do so responsibly.
Other Recent Content
I loved this recent DataGolf post. Within the post, they provide insight about pageview statistics from their website and what it indicates about interest in LIV Golf. TV ratings are hard to find and often challenging to interpret. Player pageviews are a unique, valuable proxy for the public’s interest in individual professional golfers. They’ve built themselves a really cool dataset.
Per usual, I enjoyed Garrett Morrison’s thoughts on golf course rankings and some recent online controversy.
Insightful clip from the most recent episode of Kevin Clark’s This Is Football podcast (Full episode: Apple, Spotify):
A clip from my favorite person in sports media:
And last but not least, Happy Halloween!
A humble request: I hope you’ll consider handing out subscriptions to Finding the Edge instead of Halloween candy. I’ve had a really difficult time capturing the under 10 demographic. I’m not sure if it’s a messaging or a distribution issue, and it would be super helpful if you spread the word this evening. Thanks!