Whiparound Friday: Solheim Cup Ratings, Jon Rahm, and a PGA Tour Bye Week

Welcome back to the Fried Egg Golf Newsletter! Today, we're borrowing a segment from the Shotgun Start, Friday Whiparound, where we hit on whatever topics (big and small) happen to be on our mind in the world of golf. Let's get to it.

The Solheim Cup Ratings Should Be a Three-Alarm Fire

It’s not easy for golf to gain much traction on television once football season starts in America, and it’s particularly difficult for women’s golf. But the Solheim Cup television ratings, as reported by Josh Carpenter of Sports Business Journal on Thursday, were particularly grim. Only 179,000 viewers tuned into Golf Channel on Saturday, and that number actually fell on Sunday to 170,000. The time difference didn’t help, with Sunday singles in the Netherlands coming on at 5 a.m. ET. But that number is down significantly from 2023 in Spain, when 277,000 viewers watched the Europeans retain the Cup in a 14-14 tie.

What do you do if you’re LPGA Commissioner Craig Kessler? You had a match that began the day 8-8, thanks to American fireworks late on Saturday, and the game’s biggest star (Nelly Korda) was trying to win her first Solheim Cup in Europe, and you still couldn’t get 200,000 households to watch. That’s a major red flag for the state of the game.

It’s possible that Kessler — who hasn’t been on the job a full year — has the most difficult job in all of sports. He’s fortunate, in many respects, that the LPGA’s media rights deal runs through 2030 because at least he has some time to get his footing and attempt to implement some of his own ideas. The previous commissioner, Mollie Marcoux Samaan, was able to raise purses, but poor communication with players doomed her. Getting the public’s attention might be an even more difficult task than earning the trust of the players.

Korda is doing her part — at least on the golf course. She won two majors this year, including the U.S. Women’s Open, the game’s biggest event. But it still isn’t translating into ratings. In a world where almost 90 percent of Americans watch some form of TV through streaming services, viewers are never going to stumble across the LPGA and decide to give it a chance. They have to seek it out because their algorithm isn’t going to recommend it, especially during football season. The Solheim Cup ought to be one of your premier events, something that draws in casual viewers on patriotism alone.

That so few viewers were interested, or even knew the event was happening, should scare the hell out of Kessler and his team. –Kevin Van Valkenburg

The PGA Tour Needs a Bye Week

I’m testing the limits of how soon is too soon to get into the weeds of the 2028 Tour Championship, but here we go. On Tuesday, the PGA Tour unveiled details for how membership criteria and eligibility will work in its new competitive structure, set to take effect in 2028. To me, the most significant piece is the flattening of the points system.

I know, riveting. Before your eyes glaze over, it is important.

To understand the implications, let’s look at a few numbers. Currently, winning a major awards 750 FedEx Cup points. A 10th place finish is worth 175. A 45th is worth 18. Signature events award slightly fewer points at each position.

Under the new structure, all Championship Series events will use the same distribution, meaning majors and all other Track 1 events will exist on equal footing. Winning the Masters is equivalent to winning the Travelers. By points, by points!

But equal treatment isn’t the striking part to me. It’s the flattening of the points curve. Under the new system, a win is worth 300 points, a 10th is worth 100, and a 45th is worth 50. So before, winning a major was worth more than 40 45th place finishes. Now, it is worth six.

That’s a massive change, clearly geared toward incentivizing golfers to compete often. No longer can a player win a couple big events and coast into the Tour Championship. Play a small schedule and you’ll get passed in points.

It isn’t much of a leap to think that Brian Rolapp looked at Rory McIlroy’s schedule this year, recognized that McIlroy had little to gain from playing more often, and (correctly) realized the Tour needs stronger incentives for compelling its stars to show up. Calling Rory and asking him to play isn’t a plan. The structure alone must provide the incentive.

There is one part, however, that I think the Tour has missed. Thirty-two golfers will qualify for the new two-week match play Tour Championship. Is there enough incentive to be the No. 1 seed instead of, say, the No. 27 seed? Sure, the top seed gets a slightly easier round-robin pool, but match play is high variance. Your chances of beating the 15th-ranked player versus the 23rd are not going to be that different.

Do you really think Rory McIlroy cares if he’s the seven seed or the 14 seed? I suspect not.

Long term, I think the PGA Tour should consider making the top seeds more advantageous. Maybe the top eight seeds get a first-week bye, for example. I suppose that could make a venue less interested in hosting the first weekend, since you’re taking star power away, but I think there’s a distinct possibility that the Tour will discover that the proposed format skews too random. If a bunch of the top seeds get bounced on the first weekend, it may take some juice out of the second weekend.

Top-seeded NFL teams get home-field advantage in the playoffs, a significant reward for regular season success. Offering virtually no reward for regular-season PGA Tour success seems like it may backfire.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the system is perfect as it is. We’ll see how it plays out. But flattening the points curve is an aggressive attempt at getting the stars to show up often. You’d think the Tour Championship structure would reflect that priority, too. –Joseph LaMagna

Jon Rahm is Taking on Water

Three years ago, No Laying Up joked that maybe we ought to start calling Jon Rahm “the Buoy” because he was an unsinkable force whenever he entered a golf tournament. It didn’t matter if he got off to a slow start, he was going to rise up the leaderboard eventually. At the 2023 Genesis Invitational, Max Homa borrowed a phrase from “The Avengers,” equating Rahm to Thanos, saying that sometimes he felt “inevitable” when he was chasing you. Rahm was such a consistent and menacing golfer, it was hard to imagine a world where he wasn’t a top-five player in the world.

These days, it sure does feel like the Buoy is having trouble keeping his head above water. It’s not inevitable that he’s going to sink, but it’s not unthinkable either.

Rahm shot a 78 in the opening round of the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, losing 6.27 strokes to the field. It was the second-worst performance of his career, according to analytics expert Rick Gehman. It doesn’t feel like a bridge too far to speculate that the murky future of LIV, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 8, is making it very difficult for Rahm to play his best golf.

Rahm fanboys and LIV apologists have been trying to make the argument for years that nothing has changed, that he is the same player he has always been, but the numbers tell a different story. Rahm’s Data Golf Strokes Gained number this season (+1.61) is going to end up being the worst since he turned professional. Of his nine top 10s this year, only one (T-2 at the PGA Championship) came outside a LIV event. The Official World Golf Ranking might still be suppressing the performance of LIV players, but Data Golf now considers him the 18th-best golfer in the world. That’s quite the fall.

At this point, if you still believe LIV hasn’t negatively impacted Rahm’s play, I’m not sure what to tell you. Your eyes can lie but his numbers don’t.

Maybe Rahm is so wealthy that he doesn’t care, but you only get one career to make history. The sooner Rahm gets away from LIV’s financial dumpster fire, even if it costs him a bit of pride and money, the better it will be for him and for the game. –Kevin Van Valkenburg