Brian Rolapp Is 'Aggressively' Focused On Improving The PGA Tour. Here's Where He Should Start...

Brian Rolapp, the PGA Tour's new CEO, has one main focus of improving the tour in any way possible.

It's something which came through very clear in his media address ahead of this week's Tour Championship. Whatever way he can make the PGA Tour better for its fans, players and partners, he will pursue aggressively.

He used the word 'aggressive' or 'aggressively' six times in his press conference as to how he wanted to go about making the PGA Tour the best it possible can be, and it sounds like no idea if off the table.

A new 'Future Competition Committee' has been formed with the goal of creating "the best professional golf competitive model in the world for the benefit of PGA Tour fans, players and their partners."

The committee will be chaired by Tiger Woods and is made up of PGA Tour players Patrick Cantlay, Adam Scott, Camilo Villegas, Maverick McNealy and Keith Mitchell, as well as chairman of the PGA Tour board, Joe Gorder, John Henry, principal of Fenway Sports Group and PGA Tour Enterprise board member, and Theo Epstein, a senior advisor to Fenway Sports Group.

"It is aimed at a holistic relook of how we compete on the Tour," Rolapp, a former NFL executive, said of his new committee.

"That is inclusive of regular season, postseason and off-season. We're going to focus on the evolution of our competitive model and the corresponding media products and sponsorship elements and model of the entire sport.

"The goal is not incremental change. The goal is significant change."

Rolapp is five weeks into the job and his address will certainly excite golf fans as it sounds like the PGA Tour is going to improve. But how?

"I'm interested in exploring whatever strengthens the PGA Tour," he said.

So, what would strengthen the PGA Tour? Here's some ideas...

Reunite the game

A simple way to strengthen and improve the PGA Tour would be to bring back some of the game's biggest stars like Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Cameron Smith, Joaquin Niemann and a handful of other LIV Golfers.

DeChambeau's stock has increased massively since he left the PGA Tour three years ago. SSG, which has invested $1.5bn into the tour, and Rolapp surely know that he can help to increase viewership and competition on the circuit, so getting him back should be high up on the list.

Jon Rahm is certainly another big name who would improve the PGA Tour, while golf fans will be eager to see how Joaquin Niemann would fare back on the US circuit after winning seven LIV Golf titles over the past two seasons.

Rolapp says he is "interested in exploring whatever strengthens the PGA Tour" so he is surely interested in bringing some of these big names back. How he does this, or whether it is even possible, remains to be seen.

Whether suspensions can be lifted and players can be reinstated will surely be getting looked at, but one takeaway from Rolapp's press conference was that he has not yet spoken to anybody from the Saudi Public Investment Fund.

It seems a deal between the PGA Tour and PIF is nowhere near being complete.

A better schedule

This requires an entire article to itself. The PGA Tour operates far too many tournaments and has a huge gap from its biggest events to its smallest - in terms of field strength, TV ratings and prize money.

Whether it's the opposite-field events, a number of full-field events and the FedEx Cup Fall, casual golf fans really do tend to tune out when it's not the Players Championship, a Signature Event, the FedEx Cup finale, a Major or the Ryder Cup.

There is practically no off-season, meaning fans have no time to get excited about the season returning. Rolapp is an NFL man so surely he knows a proper off-season is something the PGA Tour needs to implement.

He simply needs to create a better schedule. The lesser events need either to be elevated, removed or demoted to a second-tier tour, and the season needs to be shorter.

That will be difficult to accept for the tour's rank-and-file players and its loyal sponsors, so it is certainly not a simple task.

Sort out the Signature Events

While everything you hear about the Signature Events is positive, they simply aren't working for me.

Rolapp spoke about the tour's huge strength of competitive parity, where the line between no.1 and no.35 is razor thin and any given player can win each week. So why is the PGA Tour operating so many limited-field events?

I support the idea for just 100 PGA Tour cards and giving the entire membership more opportunities, so I don't see why many of them are left out of the biggest tournaments. The PGA Tour golfers are literally the best in the world and anybody who has earned a card is clearly a phenomenal player.

One Signature Event this year, the Truist Championship, left out Tom Kim, who was ranked 41st in the world at the time yet hadn't been able to qualify. I found that bizarre.

Once you have your card, you should be able to play in every single regular event, in my opinion.

Cuts also need to be included in every single tournament, too. Players battling to make the cut is a fundamental part of the PGA Tour and Major Championship golf and can produce some great storylines during events. Bring them back please.

Better courses

The PGA Tour has far too many treelined, parkland courses that are clearly wonderful places to play golf but just don't provoke excitement from fans.

Nobody is eager to switch their TVs on to get a look at [insert most PGA Tour venues].

Watching places like Pebble Beach (not in February), Augusta National, Oakmont, Shinnecock Hills, Royal Melbourne and all the Open Championship venues does exactly that.

The PGA Tour is supposed to be the best golf tour in the world, so it should go to the best golf courses.

Take a look at the Walker Cup, Curtis Cup, US Amateur, US Open, Open, British Amateur rotas. The tour doesn't go to anywhere near as good venues as the USGA and R&A does.

Infrastructure and logistical issues will be the excuse, but if Rolapp is serious about making the PGA Tour as good as it can possibly be, I'm sure he can come up with something.

Speed up

Like many forms of professional golf, the PGA Tour consistently has a problem with slow play.

It seems to have been a focus for the tour since the start of the year, when Dottie Pepper's comments on the broadcast during the Farmers Insurance Open went viral.

"I think we're starting to need a new word to talk about this pace of play issue, and it's respect,” Pepper said on the broadcast. “For your fellow competitors, for the fans, for broadcasts, for all of it. It's just gotta get better."

The CBS Sports announcer was rightly commended for her comments, and it certainly seems like things have improved since. But the tour can still do better and cannot rest on its laurels.

Final groups on Sunday cannot revert back to six-hour rounds on a difficult course when the wind gets up and they're playing in three balls. This is an issue which needs to be constantly monitored.

It has to continually be prioritized, as slow play is a nightmare for the sport and a big turn-off for both casual and avid viewers.

Improve the TV product

"I have lots of views. I don't think I'm prepared to share publicly, but I have started those conversations with some of our media partners," Rolapp told media on the subject of the PGA Tour broadcast.

I'll be honest, I don't actually think the TV product is as bad as some but I do constantly see comments about the number of commercial breaks, the controversial 'Playing Through' segment and the lack of golf shots shown.

Golf fans clearly want to see more shots, watch fewer commercials and hear more from the players and caddies.

Perhaps it is finally time to mic up all of the players and their caddies. This would be a tricky task as some conversations will be private, but hearing what a player and their caddie are discussing while preparing for a shot on the 71st and 72nd hole while in contention would do so much for the TV product.

The Rolex Hour has been a huge revelation during Majors and some of the biggest events, where there is an entire hour free of commercial breaks - perhaps this could be brought to every tournament once the players hit the back nine. The '[insert corporate partner] Back Nine' might work.

"Like any sport, PGA Tour is no different, the vast majority of people who experience it do through media, through television and increasingly streaming," Rolapp said.

"Getting that part of the equation right as far as reach and distribution, as far as production value, as far as having the right partners to do that right, balancing it all with commercialization, which I know has been a hot topic in this sport as it is in all sports, I think is extremely important."

College Golf

Again as an NFL man, Rolapp will know this very well but the US collegiate system is the PGA Tour's future - so it really needs to be harnessed better.

The PGA Tour University should be revamped so more college stars can move straight up to the tour if they are good enough (a lot of them are).

We've seen Luke Clanton have big success while still at school and who can forget Nick Dunlap's win at the AmEx last year as an amateur?

Players like Ludvig Aberg and Jon Rahm over recent years have come straight out of college and shown they can instantly compete.

Maybe there should be five every year who automatically make it up to the big league.

"I don't see why they're making it tougher for them to get on tour if you're a college player or whatnot," Hunter Mahan told Golf Monthly last year.

"I would want to get those guys on tour as fast as possible and I want to start marketing college players and getting them on tour with those faces that they know and stories that you could lean into.

"I think you can lose momentum by guys being on the Korn Ferry Tour and then they, not disappear, but they don't have much momentum. So, I would want to get the best players out there as fast as I can."

FedEx Cup

I wrote about this recently, saying that the FedEx Cup Playoffs are still broken.

The FedEx Cup is supposed to be the greatest prize a PGA Tour golfer can win, yet the system just doesn't feel right.

Scottie Scheffler should have won it already this season based on a meritocratic points system.

The Playoffs are still confusing for even hardcore golf fans. Are they trying to find out who the best player of the year has been or are they a silly season to reward the players and create some entertainment?

This needs to be sorted out. And it's also clear to me that the Playoff events are not box office and must-watch TV like the PGA Tour would like them to be.

Whether match play is introduced, other formats are implemented or better courses are visited, there are still many ways that the Playoffs can improve.

Rolapp made clear that anything is on the table so changes could certainly be made to the Playoffs in the future.

"I don't think fans should expect anything we're doing now to exist in perpetuity in general," he said.

"I think that gets back to my earlier comments that if we're doing our job, we're going to constantly innovate and get better. So we're going to do that."

How would you improve the PGA Tour? Let us know in the comments section below