The PGA Tour's 'March Madness' season is upon us

I the rest the news of the week – in the big world of sports, at least – has nothing to do with Saudi funding, but rather with TV money. The kind that paid for your eyeballs and your ability to switch between four different channels one week a year.

We're talking about March Madness.

As more real, important basketball playoff games play out in multiple leagues across the country, our eyes turn back to — you guessed it — money. There is a plan afoot (reportedly a lock for approval) to expand the NCAA tournament from 68 to 76 teams, doing so by adding new games to the Tuesday-Wednesday pre-tournament fake of everyone's favorite tournament. The emphasis, for now and as long as there is, continues everyone. The tourney has long had the same approval rating as the puppy.

How this relates to golf is the same way that all professionals (or rather, professionalized) related to sports. You sit down to watch and those in charge of the action hope to hold your attention for a while, while sometimes the broadcaster is paid by sponsors to distract that attention for a while with commercials. The broadcaster measures that amount against what it cost them to pay the governing body – in this case the NCAA – for the broadcast rights. It's a simple formula, but when it works the numbers call for something more complex: more games and more inventory.

Right now, pro golf has a lot to do. It covers your weekend mornings on the DP World Tour, which airs on the Golf Channel. Afternoon sessions of the PGA Tour are televised on NBC or CBS. It has been on the CW and Fox Sports for LIV Golf. And yes, the top sickos have their Thursday and Friday viewings early (or betting tons) on ESPN's digital broadcaster. There is a women's game, on TV more this year than ever. And the seniors, who hold most of the air time for the Golf Channel. And simulator golf on Monday and Tuesday nights…and so on. One would never have thought of a pro golf TV launch, but TV executives went hunting and found a buyer for the Skins Game on Amazon.

The reason the PGA Tour has been plagued for years with talk about its brand and competitive structure is that it all seems to overstate its true potential. (At least the threat posed by LIV Golf was proven.) It was nice then that the end of the PGAT season looked similar to the March tournaments and the June tournaments. Surely a lot can be squeezed into televising the world's best golfers on a regular basis?

And so is the truth of all sports programs: There is good inventory and there is no bad inventory. No one knows this better than the man who once had to sell a primetime Titans-Jaguars TV package. Enter PGA Tour CEO and former NFL No. 1 Brian Rolapp. 2.

Determining the difference between good and bad inventory has been a major focus of Rolapp's first year as CEO of the PGA Tour. He has to build a better, more efficient, more attractive roster, and he was highly recruited for his ability to do so, after a successful 22 years with the NFL. The PGA Tour (and golf) is spread thin right now, fighting small battles in many areas. Tour Traditionalists vs. Tour Investors; Journeymen vs. Superstars; long-respected tournaments are compared to profit and loss sheets. Unsurprisingly, Rolapp tasked Theo Epstein with playing a key role in the Future Competitions Commission (FCC). Epstein was one of the main experts telling baseball owners and the talent they hire, perhaps counterintuitively, that a decrease in the amount of Time Spent at the Ballpark could generate more experience for fans, increasing the popularity of this country's once beloved game. It has worked, and it is believed that the same thing can work in pro golf, although it will look very different.

If the Tour's current makeup is 12 or 13 Tier A events and 29 or more Tier B events — majors and the Ryder Cup not included — totaling a total annual TV revenue pot of about $1 billion, Rolapp's model would look something like this:

-22 Tier A events (improved with cuts, 120 players and limited access)

-18 Tier B events (with bigger bags than the Korn Ferry Tour)

-A few intangibles (we'll call you “C”) we can't fully account for it yet. Similar changes to match play in the Tour Championship and increased stakes with strong promotion and relegation. New things that can compel the interest of our TV partners.

Rolapp and (most of) his FCC have decided that there is good innovation worth chasing and there is no great list of words that they can try to better trade without completely kicking it (See: the woes of premium golf in Hawaii).

The dicey-ness comes when you go to your streaming friends and say, The menu is different and better than ever! while they have been enjoying the same food at the same table for decades and the appetizers have been changed but few real changes. What will they think?

Now, let's consider what following Inventory Madness means to the audience. Nothing about the in-game experience can change. TV timeouts will still be available every four minutes of game time. They stayed long enough to take a bathroom break. Coaches will no longer receive a timeout. They will hold them until the end of the game. Ad inventory won't increase during those Thursday and Friday rushes when we all call in “sick” from work. The inventory addition in this case is more like a new front porch attached to the same old house, threatening some charm, perhaps, but squeezing more money out of future buyers after an inspection. (What that means for the sanctity of the tournament, you can read about on other websites.) But pro golf would do no such thing. Instead it will change its competitive model so much – to draw on the previous model, refine it, redesign the basement, perhaps deliberately downsize – that the price of owning it will rise. An increase in broadcast costs does not always benefit the league or the governing body, because broadcasters (especially in golf) have a difficult history of passing those costs on to TV viewers.

That's another push-pull here, an old story by now, is that more TV rights for golf have caused broadcasters to force more ads into TV viewing. It caused more disruption to action like Playing Through, where the action is muted and pushed to a smaller frame while a loud ad plays across the majority of the screen. Even the Masters broadcaster – who has long been declared committed to watching – has come under fire this year for what appears to be an increase in commercials.

The list of sports and the sale of that list (more, more, more) feels like a story for the 2020s, as College Football turns the playoff from 4 teams to 12 to, of course, 16. Since the NFL added a 17th game and put its stuff on the 18th – while selling exclusive rights to other rights. before the season games on YouTube. Since the World Cup had a competition of 32 teams in one country and decided that it is better to have a competition with 48 teams in three countries. Perhaps the story of the 2030s will be considering which parts of that vocabulary are most lost.

As for PGA Tour inventory? The goal is obviously to fix it early, to plan for the future, to make its existing inventory so good that buyers won't even bother to check how it's paid for. I will understand if you are a skeptic. But I'm hopeful as I stare at the ruins of LIV Golf for a day on the calendar when Rolapp promises he'll have more to share. June's Traveler Championship is eight weeks away. Another great tournament where we will have plenty the rest talk about it.

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