PGA Tour needs stars to build momentum with wins amid drought of big-name champions to start season

With football over and major championships upcoming, the PGA Tour could sure use a bit of momentum

One year ago -- entering the Arnold Palmer Invitational -- it may have been fair to say that Chris Kirk was the least-exciting winner the PGA Tour had among its first events of the new season. Fast forward 12 months, and Kirk might be the most-exciting at the same juncture.

Kirk had just won the 2023 Honda Classic, which ended an insane run that saw Jon Rahm, Max Homa, Justin Rose, Si Woo Kim and Scottie Scheffler emerge as tournament winners. Kirk recently won the 2024 The Sentry, which kicked off a run of ... Grayson Murray, Nick Dunlap, Matthieu Pavon and Austin Eckroat as champions. 

Sure, Hideki Matsuyama and Wyndham Clark have also won tournaments this year, but Kirk (No. 55 in the Data Golf rankings) is at least in their ballpark.

The conversation undergirds the broader point: This season on the PGA Tour has lacked compelling victors, and outside of one Sunday at Riviera, there's been a serious lack of top-level drama, too.

Why is that?

Part of it is because stars have left for LIV Golf, of course. Rahm won three times between Jan. 1 and the Arnold Palmer Invitational last year. He's gone, playing with Legion XIII in Hong Kong this week. Part of it is bad luck with weather, which shortened the Pebble Beach Pro Am to three rounds. Part of it is that there has never been a clearer differentiation between the signature events and the events that, well, are not signature events.

The majority of it, though, is simply stars not stepping up and being stars.

You can frame that however you want, as Patrick Cantlay did Tuesday at Bay Hill.

"It's harder to win out here than it ever has [been]," he said. "Guys play more aggressively, and the scores, as you can see, are lower and lower, seemingly every year. I always marvel at the beginning of the year how many under par guys shoot at the Sentry. It's essentially the same golf course, but guys keep shooting lower and lower.

"Yeah, I think winning, you got to keep putting yourself in position time after time, and some of those weeks you get the right break at the right time. You hit a couple putts that, instead of going on the lip, they go in. Usually those are the weeks that you win."

If this is true then not enough of the PGA Tour's best players -- Cantlay included -- have put themselves around enough leads thus far. Nobody in the Data Golf top 25 has won a PGA Tour event in 2024. Most of them have not been all that close, either.

Where are all the shootouts between the best players in the world? Where are the head-to-head duels that have so often marked the PGA Tour's West Coast swing?

This would all be fine if the PGA Tour was a league that could rest on (and market toward) parity.

Parity is fine in the NFL because the fan base of each team is big enough that you don't need casual fans gravitating toward whether a team can go undefeated. In an individual sport like golf, though? It's far less compelling to tout depth with names like Pavon, Eckroat and Murray than it is when Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler are rolling. That's how it's always been, and likely, how it will always be.

The PGA Tour needs a couple big weeks to find some level of momentum with major championship season approaching.

The good news is that the league has two of its biggest tournaments over the next 10 days -- Bay Hill this week and the crown jewel Players Championship next week at TPC Sawgrass. Plenty will be forgotten if names like Homa, Spieth, McIlroy and Collin Morikawa find the winner's circles.

These are fragile times for professional golf and its assorted leagues. What might not seem like that big of a deal right now could create ripples we will not see for months or even years into the future.

Amid negotiations with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the PGA Tour is now backed by $3 billion from the Strategic Sports Group. It needs to come to the table with a world class product right now, too.

What has happened over the first three months has been fine for the sickos and decent television at times, but it's not what the PGA Tour envisioned and not necessarily what fans wanted. It's time for the stars to step up. All of them would be great, but even just one would be enough.