The PGA Tour has a huge advantage over the similar, dueling team-based concepts proposed by World Golf Group with their Premier Golf League and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Investments league headed by Greg Norman.
The advantage is that they're the PGA Tour, locked into long-spanning, lucrative broadcast contracts and can boast all of the world top 50 as members. They're a steady, well-managed machine that rakes in cash and can dole even more of it out to players without so much as threatening their bottom line or causing a PR crisis for their players.
In other words, if the PGA Tour wanted to create their own big-money, team-based concept, they could do it without much of a sweat and with the infrastructure already in place to run it all like a well-oiled machine.
Turns out, the Tour is considering doing just that.
According to the Associated Press, the PGA Tour is exploring the creation of a post-season fall series that would feature huge purses with guaranteed money, including long-eschewed (and sometimes craftily skirted) appearance fees for players based on the final standing in the prior season's FedEx Cup standings.
Similarly, the AP reports the Tour is looking at trying to create an additional bonus pool to reward the top five players in the FedEx Cup standings heading into the Tour Championship -- an insurance policy, of sorts, against a high-stakes Tour Championship format that can cost a contender millions with a bad week in Atlanta.
What would this mean for the PGA Tour schedule?
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