28, no kids, and consequently a reasonable amount of free time on my hands. As we’re rapidly approaching the second tgl season I thought I’d share some of my thoughts with a brief team-by-team preview following a hectic offseason.

The Drive - the defending champs have a lot of questions to answer going into season 2. JT is out for the season and Billy Ho is coming off injury (which may have been caused by doing the dirty bird too much), but rumor is his surgery was planned so his recovery would peak just as season 2 begins. Lucas Glover is splitting time between his golf game and increasingly popular radio show, and the Pat in the hat had a year so bad he fell from 11th in the world this time last year to his current standing at 24th (somewhere he hasn’t been since the SGS was only a few months old).

NYGC - Rickie is still Rickie, but aside from that the team is on the rise. After a heartbreaking defeat in the championship last year, Cam Young (Mr. ~746) has caught fire, Chicago’s son is back playing well, and Xander has a new app and ended the year looking not that bad I guess.

LAGC - The Brits on this team are playing great, with Rosey sitting at 10th in the OWGR and YouTuber/Fedex cup champ ( listed in order of importance) Tommy Fleetwood ending the year as the hottest player on the planet(?). How will that translate to an indoor sim league with horribly inaccurate launch monitors? Not sure. The Americans on this team are another story. Sahith was out for most of this year injured, and Colin might holdout because this will be too much media interaction. Maybe he and Marty can bond over what product they use to coif their hair.

The Bay - Honestly I don’t have much on these guys. Thank god the Chef didn’t go to Liv or else Matt Berry wouldn’t know what to talk about. Wyndham is probably still doing community service on the grounds of Oakmont so who knows if he’s even eligible to play.

Jupiter Links - Did I miss something or do we still not know what’s going on here? Tiger certainly can’t play but he still could probably crutch out there and be better than Kis. Max and TK both aren’t playing great to my knowledge. I’m not a gambling man but the line for holes won for the year with this lineup has to be O/U 6.5.

B Frogs - I think Rory announced on the SGS that Michael Thorbjornsen was joining the team, so does that mean someone is leaving? Do they just get another player since they didn’t win a game last year? Or is it a prize for Rory winning the grand slam? No matter, things have to be looking up for the Frogs as they can’t do worse than last year and the “players” have them first in the preseason polls.

Pre Season Power rankings: 1. NYGC 2. The Bay 3. LAGC 4. Frogs 5. Drive 6. Jup Stinks

Maybe this will be a weekly power rankings (probably not) with inspiration taken from the WOWgr, which left us far too soon.

Thoughts on the golf games? Feeling a lot of the fatigue Brendan referenced on SGS with these “the match” style tv events. Seems like the main focus is to pack as many sponsorships and gambling promos as possible. The idea of a golf skills competition is fun, but when Rory was on the pod and said the idea was just brought to them and there wasn’t much input into the events it didn’t sound good.

Rory on the Year in Review????? No…. No. No way.

Just an alert that PGA Tour Q School is on. If it ended at this moment, there would be a 6-for-1 playoff. Could be an interesting watch. You also have Tosti and Spencer Levin in the mix.

While I am certain the Egg has better things to spend resources on, I would like the team to consider investing in attorney fees for a cease and desist - I believe TGL has begun to poach ideas from the Fried Egg community, and where will it stop unless the Egg sends a message?!

Last year, a number of us designed wild video game golf holes as part of a TGL themed contest. As part of that, I submitted a crazed version of the Golden Gate Bridge, complete with an arch that forced players to hit a punch shot underneath it.

Two days ago, TGL debut one of their new holes, and a key design feature looks awfully familiar (attached). I do not believe this is imitation is a form of flattery - this is outright thievery, bordering on audaciously putting someone else’s right protected photos behind your own paywall!

While, I assume the egg does not want to begin their second 10 years litigating with SoFi, Tiger and Rolapp, on behalf of the architecturally creative members of the Friday community, please at least consider protecting the intellectual property that we contribute, which of course has an inestimable worth, especially when the design bears resemblance to Michael Block

First discussion topic and first post all baked into one! If Harris English is correct and the "new" PGA Tour will have open weeks/gap weeks, why not make Monday Qualifiers matter? Pre-1983 or so, there were only 60 exempt players and the rest had to either finish top-15 the week prior or Monday qualify. It wasn't for one or two spots, it was for many. If the new Tour will have off weeks before and after some, many or all of the PGA Tour events, why not make the week start on Monday with a robust Monday Qualifying event from which 20 or 30 or 40 players qualify? That could be a great kick-off to the week, especially if there isn't a tournament the week before. Thoughts?

This was a pleasant addition to my Wednesday routine last summer but seemed like a short lived experiment. Are there planes (or even an opportunity) to do it again?

The family had gone to bed last night, and I found myself with a quiet house. Having not seen much of Royal Melbourne ever, I was excited to turn on the television and watch a bit of the tournament.

what I was treated to was roughly an hour of guys putting. That’s it. Putts. A few bunker shots. Then miraculously there was a digital flyover of a hole after about 45 minutes, and someone hit an approach shot. And then right back to putting.

i’m curious if anyone else has watched the coverage and seen something better. I was disappointed to say the least.

Every once in a while when i run out of pods to listen to i throw on an SGS episode from a handful of years back. Commentary is hilarious and it’s interesting hearing the state of golf then and seeing how much it’s changed. I noticed on Apple Podcasts that there are no episodes pre June of 2019, are those available anywhere or are they the lost pods?

Jeeno's pile of cash got a whole lot bigger this weekend. She's never finished outside the top 10 at Tiburon, so there's a good chance she just keeps on cashing big checks there for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure what I find harder to believe....Nelly going winless this year or Jeeno still not having a major. Plenty of great moments from this year, but overall, what a strange season. What stands out to everyone as the moment of the year?

https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-announces-media-rights-deals-with-espn-nbc-netflix

Sunday Night Baseball has officially moved to NBC. Why do I post that here?

With NBC now officially booked every Sunday Night of the year between NFL, NBA, and MLB, this adds a major hurdle to the myriad suggestions every year that the FedEx Cup Playoffs move to the west coast and air on primetime. I also wonder about west coast US Opens.

On the most recent FEG podcast, Andy brings up the question of what should the Tour do with all of the cash they have on hand from the recent investment from SSG? He offers the suggestion of adding permanent grandstands because people clearly love to play a golf course when it has the stadium feel, just look at how demand sky rocketed at Bethpage this year.

My initial thought for this question was to use a small chunk of that $3 billion to renovate some of the stinker TPC courses with a top tier architect like Tom Doak, who has proven that he's great at building a golf course that challenges pros and creates interesting tournament play. See Memorial Park in Houston, TX.

While turning a subpar TPC course into an excellent one may not do quite enough to help the PGA Tour gain more momentum it would be cool if the TPC network didn't have a bunch of lousy courses. They already have the infrastructure in place, most are close to metro areas so perhaps a high quality golf course that's stimulating to watch the pros play along with some extra bells and whistles (permanent grandstands?) could create these longstanding hubs for events so the tour doesn't have to rely so much on country clubs hosting their tournaments.

Yes, this does sound like the stadium course concept that Pete Dye and Dean Beaman were after in the 1980's but maybe we could do a better job in modern times. I'm not sure if this is even a good idea by myself and perhaps I'm being selfish for just wanting more quality publicly accessible designs but I'd love to hear other peoples pipe dream ideas for what the PGA should do with its stockpile of cash other than give the players comfy pensions.

An idea I’ve been thinking about that I think could save Kapalua as a PGA Tour host, turn the Sentry into a match play event.

If the tour isn’t willing to turn the Tour Championship into a match play event then Kapalua to start the season is the perfect opportunity.

You can easily seed the players based on the prior years FedEx Cup Standings. The reason tv allegedly doesn’t like match play is that there’s a potential for a weak Sunday final match, but here you are turning it into an advantage. You are taking the opportunity to have multiple amazing golf matches happening in prime time simultaneously on weekdays. Kapalua Sunday is always competing with football anyway and with only one match to worry about it’s easier to find a time slot that minimizes the direct competition. Finally, if there is an element that people don’t like about Kapalua is that scores are so low but by making it match play you can eliminate that talking point and I think Kapalua could be a perfect match play course.

I’m sure the Tour won’t go in this direction but am I missing something or would this idea work?

For those of us that use the TOUR app to track tournament scores, and abuse the favorites button, it is always good litmus test to see the number of "Favorites" in any given tournament. For me, the high bar is always THE PLAYERS, clocking in at 30 Favorites. Do I have 30 "favorite" players? No. I blame SGS banter and NLU podcast interviews for clogging up my list. In contrast, this week I only have four "favorites" in the Butterfield field:

ZB, Higgs, Sahith, and Kuchar.

Dare I say this is a MargarineField at best. I'll see myself out.

Must-watch stuff from Pablo Torre this morning on golf's "hyest flyer."

A lot of receipts presented, showing Phil Mickelson's links with a troubled energy company begging to be bailed out by the White House.

You know the content is good because Phil is already threatening to sue random Twitter accounts that engage with it.