Max Homa defends PGA Tour changes: ‘Expect more battles like Tiger v Mickelson’

Max Homa has defended the changes to the PGA Tour’s schedule coming into effect from 2024 onwards.

The PGA Tour recently announced a shake-up to their scheduling which will now see eight of its’ leading events – excluding Majors – to feature smaller fields along with the removal of the traditional 36-hole cut.

This has brought frustration from some with comparisons to the Saudi-backed LIV Golf who have small 48-man fields, but Homa disagrees and insists the real winners here are spectators.

“I love the new changes,” said Homa. “The reason I wanted to join the Player Advisory Council is because I think I do provide a unique perspective as in 2017, 2018… I guess I’ve just seen all kind of levels of professional golf between the Korn Ferry Tour and the PGA Tour.

“I believed in this back then and I believe in this now. I didn’t maybe see exactly what is being done. I’m not quite smart enough to have planned this one out.

“The product is important. I think it’s easy to frame these changes as a way to put more money in the top players’ pockets, but it has been made to make it easier and more fun for the fans.

“It is a guarantee on who will be at events, more or less, and leaning more on the more there.

“It is more opportunity for the top players to battle it out late on Sundays. Which, you look back at times of Phil and Tiger, the two best players growing up for me watching, and they had like maybe two real battles. So we’re going to have more of that.

“The non-designated events are the same purses with, I mean, on paper, weaker fields. So financially that doesn’t change a whole lot. And there’s a lot of room for growth throughout that.

“You can play your way into the designated events and go from playing an event for the exact same amount of money to playing it for significantly more amount of money with a two-week good golf stretch or a win or something like that.”

One of the biggest complaints to these new changes is the reduction in the field size with these ‘elevated’ tournaments being reduced to just 70 to 78 players.

However, the 32-year-old American explained that less players ensures all of the other ‘non-elevated’ events on the schedule remain important.

“I think the part that’s frustrating and maybe the part that just simply might be misunderstood is that if we made these fields very large in these designated events it would ruin non-designated events that have been staples of the PGA Tour,” added Homa.

“It would ruin them. No one would play in half of them because it would no longer fit your schedule by any means.

“So I think that the Tour’s done a great job of looking into that and seeing that this would be a great number to cut to to make sure that we still have competitive events that are non-designated, while keeping the sponsors and the fans happy with the parity – maybe not the top 50 big names – but big names.”

Homa is playing in this week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill.

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