On Tuesday, in a memo to PGA Tour members, the PGA Tour’s Player Advisory Council, in conjunction with the player directors on the Policy Board, proposed major changes to tour operations. They included a significant reduction in the overall tour membership (dropping, among other categories, how many players keep their cards each year based on their finish in the FedEx Cup standings from 125 to 100), smaller tournament fields and fewer playing opportunities via sponsor exemptions and Monday qualifying. The FedEx Cup points allocation for tournament finishes is also being adjusted, and the tour’s pace-of-play policy is being modified.

The full details of the proposal can be found here. It seems almost certain these changes will be passed when presented to the full Policy Board for a vote in mid-November, and formally implemented for the 2026 season.

To further explore the origins and impact of the changes, Golf Digest has convened four writers for a roundtable discussion of the soon-to-be reinvented PGA Tour.

There are lots of moving parts to the plan, but overall what do you think of the proposed changes?

My knee-jerk reaction is generally positive. You could make the case that the PGA Tour offers way too many cards and exemptions or think it’s too much of a closed shop and you could find others to agree either way. I like the idea of fewer cards at season’s end but not cutting field sizes. A future breakout star might be among the casualties of smaller fields. You have to develop talent every step of the way. —Dave Shedloski

Some good and some bad, which makes it a classic compromise deal in some respects. If you were starting a tour from scratch, are these the rules you’d settle on? Probably not. But the PGA Tour isn’t starting from scratch. It’s shepherding a bunch of players whose livelihood is on the line, while holding lots of its own baggage. In that context, these changes are at least a step in the right direction. —Luke Kerr-Dineen

Since the memo came out, I’ve been trying to focus on the reasoning behind why this is all happening now. The chief impetus, according to the players, is to address issues of “field sizes and pace of play.” The former to me can only be seen as a concern for top players—reduced field sizes mean a greater chance of being paid each week. The latter is a more general concern shared by fans … though, of course, field sizes have a direct effect on pace of play. The larger question in my mind is this: Is it all really a way to cut costs and reduce size without cutting the paychecks of the top players? Or, asked another way, is this just another inevitable response to LIV? If you’re an investor in the tour, you probably like this—it has the dual benefit of reducing expenditures while sharpening the focus on the players who “move the needle.” But I’m worried that in practice, it will continue to drain the romance from the game by making it that much less democratic. I’ve seen the phrase “pulling up the ladder behind them” used several times on social media in relation to the pros, and I can see where they’re coming from. —Shane Ryan

Whatever is between thumbs up and thumbs to the side. Lukewarm. —Christopher Powers

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The biggest beneficiaries are the top players—as long as they can remain top players—and investors in the PGA Tour. If the tour can actually improve pace of play, you can add “the fans” to that mix, though I still have my doubts as to whether pace of play is an issue at the forefront of fans’ minds (compared to, say, commercial load in broadcasts). —S.R.

Players on the lower end of the top 50. They weren’t in much danger of losing their tour card anyway, and now they’ll be playing against smaller fields for bigger checks. Staying in the top 50 and securing spots in the PGA Tour’s signature events just got a little easier. And unless they’re notably slow players, they’ll probably be fined less, too. —L.K.D.

I’m with LKD … To me it would seem like the middle-tier player benefits most. The consistent cut-maker who contends a few times a year. —C.P.

Well, anyone already on the inside is a beneficiary. True, they have to stay there, but now they face less competition week to week. —D.S.

Who is most hurt by the changes?

It feels like Korn Ferry Tour players are getting a rough go of things here. A 20-percent reduction in PGA Tour memberships grabs the headline, but KFT graduates trimming from 30 to 20 represents a 33-percent decrease. This is in addition to fewer Q-School opportunities by eliminating ties, plus the changes in restricted sponsors’ exceptions. It’s going to be a lot harder to get to the promised land—and with fewer members overall, even more difficult to stay there. —L.K.D.

I think the players on the Korn Ferry Tour are really getting squeezed here. They have gone from 50 spots to 30 to now 20 in recent years. Granted, they were struggling to get starts as it was, but the apprenticeship process that already was a tough road got tougher. But, hey, maybe you get tougher players graduating in the process. —D.S.

Unfortunately, the guys who are always one week away from changing their lives. The Gruden grinders. —C.P.

Anyone hoping to make a career on the PGA Tour who is not already in the upper echelons of the game. Making it on tour just became incrementally harder, and it was already close to impossible. If I were the 125th ranked player on tour, I’d probably be pretty frustrated that I was being punished for issues beyond my control. —S.R.

The tour says it’s trying to impact pace of play, with the field reduction but with other changes to its pace-of-play policy. Do you think it will help?

The minute I saw the line that “these proposals involve giving players more time to hit and reducing or eliminating fines based on bad times,” I did not have high hopes for pace of play improving. —C.P.

Reduction of field sizes will help, and so will the additional fines they plan to levy for receiving bad times in tournament play. The real head-scratcher, though, are the changes they outlined at the end of the memo that all seem designed to give players more time, not less, to hit the ball, as well as reducing certain fines. It feels like a “one step forward, one step back” situation, and at the very least, from a PR angle, they should maybe have saved that for a different memo. But it’s also easy to see players fighting for those concessions and having a pretty powerful position from which to do so. —S.R.

Let’s think this through. You are cutting the fields down to ensure rounds can get completed, then it appears that you are prepared to give more time for players to hit shots while eliminating fines for bad times. Is this not a recipe for making rounds even SLOWER? Seems like you gain nothing. —D.S.

The way these rules are written, it sounds like the powers-that-be think trimming field sizes and penalizing repeat slow-play offenders (whose fines are going up) is going to solve the problem. I think that’s a very generous reading that likely isn’t true. The fact is that in the eyes of many fans, the tour has an across-the-board slow-play problem. Ask golf’s most avid watchers, and they’ll tell you that players who play at an average pace are still too slow. It’s not a few bad apples. It’s a cultural problem. Everyone needs to get faster, and this probably won’t help with that. —L.K.D.

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Certain aspects of this could make the product incrementally better, but there’s a certain unromantic element to it all that feels very much in line with the changes we’ve seen over the last two years in the struggle against LIV. Let’s say in the most optimistic case that pace of play improves, and there are fewer Thursdays and Fridays where rounds aren’t finished. That’s fine and dandy, but does it fix the really big issues concerning fan alienation, broadcast product and a sport that feels financially way over-extended? The answer to this question could end up being a qualified “yes,” while still not being very satisfying or impactful. —S.R.

Cosmetic is a perfect word. I saw nothing that would genuinely “move” a fan of the sport in these proposals. There are still only four weeks that matter all year. —C.P.

The main product complaints from fans seem to be: field sizes are too big, broadcast windows too large, pace of play too slow, tour membership too bloated. These changes move the ball forward, if only a little. But on the upside, progress is progress, right? —L.K.D.

I tend to make the calculation that fewer players in a field means less entertainment for spectators, so I’m not a fan from that side of the equation. Having said that, the tour and its players obviously have taken a hard look at the bigger picture and figured that a streamlining of the product is beneficial at a time when other sports are taking measures to shorten their windows of competition. The ultimate judges are the fans. We’ll see what they say. —D.S.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com