Next week’s PGA Tour event, the Cadillac Championship, is just the latest in the Signature Event series — the limited-field, $20 million free-for-alls that 99% of pros desperately want to play in. And there’s good news for that super majority — technically, two sponsor exemptions have not yet been finalized.
Normally, by the Saturday prior, most Signature Event fields are set. You have the top 50 from the previous year, a handful of winners from this season, the 10 players not already in who have played best this year and five others who have played best recently. On top of that, as has become controversial, there are always four sponsor exemptions which, quietly, are not always decided until the last minute.
The reason is obvious: if a player can qualify on his own, it’s decidedly better optics for them and their game than using a sponsor exemption. For the sponsor, it’s a great scenario, too, because their list of choices is always longer than four. Any player from the sponsor’s unpublished priority ranking who plays their way in just allows Sponsor Choice No. 5 to join the field.
This actually happened for RBC and its post-Masters Heritage tournament. During Masters week, Max Homa was included as a sponsor exemption on the Tour’s internal field list until he played well enough at Augusta National that he qualified for the Heritage without needing a sponsor invite. It’s a win-win — Homa gets in, and RBC gets to invite another of its favorites. They went with Wyndham Clark, Tony Finau, Billy Horschel and Marco Penge — the order of which is not made public.
This retelling matters for next week’s tournament, a newly created Signature Event at an old-time Tour course, Trump National Doral. Only Joel Dahmen and Max Greyserman are listed as sponsor exemptions at the moment — both worthy choices, neither of which will earn their way in at the last minute like Homa did, after missing this week’s cut at the Zurich Classic. They’ll be joined by two others, to be decided Sunday evening, a selection that isn’t finalized because … there are some big names on the verge of being an alternate, and there are fewer big-name players interested in playing, period.
Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele, Bob MacIntyre, Ludvig Aberg and Matt Fitzpatrick — all ranked in the world top 15 — will be skipping next week in Miami. (For McIlroy, it’ll be the second Signature Event skipped this season.) All together, it’s the most significant voluntary departure of talent any Signature Event has seen to date, and there’s an extremely obvious reason: most pros are okay playing three events in a row. But some definitely don’t want to play a major championship in that third week.
As ever with the PGA Tour’s Rubik’s Cube-scheduling dilemma, there isn’t one specific element to blame for this issue. And once you solve for one side of the cube — like finding a new, massive sponsor commitment. That’s a positive! — you can easily disrupt the other sides. In the simplest sense, the Cadillac Championship didn’t exist last year. When pros build their annual commitment list, this spot feels more like a surprise than anything else. It is also situated directly prior to another Signature Event, the Truist Championship at Quail Hollow, which sits directly prior to the PGA Championship in Philadelphia. It feels skippable if the other weeks don’t.
By and large, most top pros have settled on a schedule of 22 to 26 events. That way, they’re playing no more than half the calendar year. Brian Rolapp is painfully aware of this number, as are the billionaire investors of his product. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, one of the pro game’s biggest investors, is also very aware. Rory McIlroy bluntly told him that “26 weeks” maximum for top pros during a meeting a few years ago. A Tour that gets top pros to play 22 to 26 times can be a commercially great product, so long as those 22 to 26 events are … the same events. But that remains the quandary of the moment: which events fit in that 22- to 26-event schedule, and how do you place them throughout the January to August calendar so you can get McIlroy to show up as many times as possible. Sticking a Signature Event the week before a Signature Event that sits the week before a major is not in the Tour’s future. You can count on that.
The distribution of these top events — “Track 1” events, as they’re likely to be called in the future — will not appease everyone, but until they are cemented into sensible places on the calendar, there will be trickle-down results like top pros voluntarily skipping. That is to say nothing of Texas-based players who want to play the two weeks following the PGA Championship, at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson and Charles Schwab Challenge. Scottie Scheffler will be defending his title at the former — and at the PGA Championship, too — but he is not in the field for the Truist Championship, another $20 million free-for-all the week before the PGA. Different pros have different priorities — we know that. But it has bred an intriguing reality: between the Masters and the PGA Championship, three Signature Events will have been played. McIlroy and Scheffler will have never competed against each other once.
It can be dizzying to track who’s in and who’s out during this particularly signature time of the season, but the results of these fields — who wants in and when — coupled with the randomness of fan favorites hitting a rough patch, are what make schedule creation a fickle business. It’s what makes Brian Rolapp’s job particularly tricky at the moment, where sponsor involvement, course commitment and competitive structure are all a bit fluid. The status quo works in so many ways, but is largely dependent on star golfers showing up and playing like star golfers. Any week when that’s undercut by those golfers simply not showing up underscores it even more.
