PGA Tour shakes up management team with hiring of Brian Rolapp as CEO

• Brian Rolapp, former NFL executive, is appointed as the PGA Tour’s first CEO, replacing Jay Monahan.
• Rolapp aims to leverage his media experience to enhance the Tour’s TV deals and potentially revitalize the sport.
• Monahan will remain with the Tour until his contract expires in 2026, but his role will be diminished.
• Rolapp inherits the challenge of resolving the ongoing conflict with LIV Golf and unifying the golfing world.

The PGA Tour is shaking up its management team at the very top. Brian Rolapp is in, and Jay Monahan is out.

Rolapp, 53, was officially named the Tour’s first CEO on Tuesday. He spent the past 22 years at the NFL and was widely considered to be the favorite to assume the commissioner duties of the most successful sports league from Roger Goodell. That’s really all you need to know about why the Tour also included in the announcement that Monahan agreed to stay on until his contract expires at the end of 2026, but his days are officially numbered. In short, Rolapp wasn’t making a lateral move from the NFL to serve behind Monahan.

By all indications, this is a great ‘get’ for the Tour, a leader who has been described as both curious and a sponge. In his former role, Rolapp orchestrated the NFL’s media rights deals, creating the Thursday Night Football package and growing the sport’s fan base to record numbers. He’s well-equipped to draw even more value from the Tour’s TV package, which will come up for bid in a couple of years and goes into effect in 2031. Live sports – those moments such as Sunday when J.J. Spaun sinks a 65-foot birdie putt on the last hole to win the U.S. Open – are the last, great unscripted show that the world tunes into to watch as a shared experience. Former pro and current member of the Tour policy board likes to borrow a phrase that legendary investor Warren Buffett coined, calling the NFL and the PGA Tour and the other big sports monopolies the ultimate “ham sandwich business.” It’s a business so good that a “ham sandwich” could run it.

Brian Rolapp doesn’t come from the golf world

Rolapp isn’t a golf guy – he played lacrosse at BYU – but he earned his gas money in college working at the turn at Congressional Country Club near D.C., and tries to play 5-10 times a year, though he doesn’t have a USGA-registered handicap.

Who is Brian Rolapp? 5 things to know about the PGA Tour’s new CEO

“No one hired me for my golf game here. That’s not my job,” he said. “My job is to do other things.”

And Rolapp is smart enough to know what he doesn’t know, saying, “Everything that works in the football world may not work in the golf world.”

Arthur Blank, the owner of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and an investor in the Tour through his role in private equity group SSG, which invested $1.5 billion in the Tour last year, took the lead on the hiring of the first CEO along with a group that included Tiger Woods and Adam Scott. 

“I think the investment of capital and the pledge of future capital has been one of the things that have strengthened the Tour. I think it’s a huge opportunity,” Rolapp said. “Where we deploy that capital, I have ideas. I don’t think I want to share them now, but that’s going to be part of the job to get in there and talk about it.”

Rolapp made clear he’ll be taking the reins now

Rolapp doesn’t start the job officially until later this summer but he already has “ideas.” And he made it clear during his introductory press conference that he isn’t afraid to shake things up. 

“We’re going to honor tradition, but we’re not going to be unnecessarily bound by it, and where it makes sense to change, we’re going to do that,” he said. “I think that’s something to take from my previous experience that I’m excited to apply here.”

Publicly, Rolapp expressed that having Monahan stick around will be helpful as “a resource,” but made it clear that he’ll be running the day-to-day operations while Monahan takes a backseat with various board duties.

New PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp on the 3 things he hopes to take from NFL to professional golf

Jay Monahan’s era marked by good and bad

“I’m going to run through the finish line and then I’ll figure that out,” Monahan told Sports Business Journal.

A lot of people in golf’s ecosystem will say it is about time for Monahan to move on. He arrived in 2008, having previously served as a tournament director of the Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston and the Fenway Sports Group, and was Tim Finchem’s handpicked successor, taking over in 2017. It hasn’t been an easy time to be commissioner between dealing with the sport’s COVID interruption to the injuries and the accident endured by Tiger Woods, which limited the play of the game’s star attraction.

But the Tour kept signing sponsors and inked a huge, new TV deal that runs through 2030, just days before the pandemic began in earnest. It has continued to run the Deane Beman playbook, conceived in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Tour’s second commissioner, who handed the keys to Finchem in 1994, shortly before Tiger came along and turbo-charged the Tour’s growth. It became the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, calling the shots to the other professional circuits and governing bodies. It truly was a ‘ham sandwich’ business and seemed bullet-proof until a competitor, LIV Golf, with endless pockets from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as its financial backer, emerged.

In recent years, the Tour has been reacting rather than innovating, making decisions geared to keep certain players from fleeing for guaranteed money. Those moves haven’t made sense for the bottom line or the product on the field. The Tour has dipped into the reserves to pay its stars and alienated fans who are tired of the greed.

Monahan messed up a ham sandwich business. They’ll be teaching about it at Harvard Business School before long. He should have taken the original call from the Saudis and he should have informed the players and the rest of the board before negotiating secretly the framework agreement with PIF, which was announced in 2023. Negotiations to complete a deal have yet to bear fruit, and the two sides appear farther apart than ever despite the efforts of President Donald Trump. Division in the game remains a distraction. How to resolve it is Rolapp’s problem now. He made clear he wants to get the best players together more than the current four times a year, none of which happen at Tour-owned events.

“I think everyone is talking about that. My view is I come in with a pretty clean sheet of paper. I also come in knowing that there’s a lot to learn,” he said. “It’s a complex situation. No less than two sovereign nations are involved in this discussion so it’s not easy. But I will say I have experience with complex situations and anything I’ve learned, I will apply to that situation and try to figure it out.”

Rolapp cited three things he would take from his football days that he sees as applicable to golf. The game has to be strong, which begets strong partners – both sponsors and media. And the Tour’s product has become stale — it’s time to innovate.

“One thing the NFL has taught me is just when you think you are successful, that’s when you really need to look at things and change again,” he said. 

In a separate interview with Sports Business Journal, he rammed this point home: “As I always say, only the paranoid survive.”

Spoken like someone who believes he can make the PGA Tour a ham sandwich business again. Just don’t ask him his handicap.

“I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “It’s going to be classified. There’s a reason I didn’t put it in.”