PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — If you needed any evidence of how quickly things can change on the PGA Tour, you needed only to be within shouting distance of a window on Tuesday afternoon at Pebble Beach.
As the golf world settled into the first event of the post-Super Bowl season, Pebble Beach settled into its typical early-February weather volatility. Beautiful, blue skies on an unusually mild morning quickly ruptured into dark gashes of grey, as the wind swelled loud enough to rattle the glass on Pebble Beach’s newly renovated golf lodge.
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This was the environment as Rory McIlroy stepped to the lectern to speak for the first time in the United States in 2026. The reigning Masters (and Pebble Pro-Am) champ arrived, as usual, with a laundry list of hot-button golf topics to address — but this year the biggest of them surrounded a rival league of much different proportions: The NFL, which just wrapped its final event of the season just an hour up the road from Pebble Beach in Santa Clara, Calif.
As with most years, the Super Bowl provided the golf world with a stark reminder of the NFL’s power over the American sports audience. But unlike most years, this year’s Super Bowl arrived at a time of heightened interest in the NFL at PGA Tour headquarters, where former NFL executive Brian Rolapp is eyeing a change agenda to model the Tour after its football counterparts.
In the world floated by Rolapp, the Tour season could begin here, in Pebble, the week after the Super Bowl — ceding the early winter to football but claiming the spring and summer months as the glut of the Tour schedule. That change wouldn’t be all that different for McIlroy, who traditionally begins his year by playing a handful of events in the Middle East as part of the DP World Tour, but it would mark a massive shift for the rest of the Tour, which has traditionally started shortly after the new year.
At Pebble, the question facing McIlroy was the same as the question facing the Tour in early 2026: How much of the NFL is worth stealing, and how much of the old PGA Tour is worth keeping?
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But the more McIlroy talked about football, the more a deep irony began to shine through: The guy tasked with being the missionary for pro golf’s footballification? He’s not a football fan. Like at all.
“No, I think, yeah, football is —,” McIlroy said, pausing. “I’ve tried really hard with football. Like I’ve tried really hard.”
“I could watch a game of cricket for five days and be mesmerized,” McIlroy said. “I think I just — I didn’t grow up with it, so that’s why I maybe don’t take to it quite as naturally.”
Thankfully, McIlroy need not appreciate the finer points of Cover 6 to see the virtue in Rolapp’s approach.
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“I can appreciate [the NFL],” McIlroy said. “It’s a short season and then once it goes away, people miss it. From a marketing perspective it’s genius, right? They drip feed things. It’s the Combine, then it’s the draft, then it’s pre-season. It’s like OK, the season is short but they drip feed just enough to keep you really interested the whole way through the year.”
Of course, part of the NFL’s genius is the spectacle of the Super Bowl, which resets advertising and TV viewership records with relative ease every February. The Super Bowl is one fleeting moment of sports monoculture — a dominant, defining event that gives meaning to the rest of the NFL season.
The PGA Tour doesn’t have that, though it does have the Players Championship — a top-tier event that slots into the category directly beneath the major championships. The Tour’s marketing department has recently flirted with the idea of resuscitating the Players as the “fifth major” — a decision that no doubt pleases the Tour’s new investor class with the Strategic Sports Group, but has received a more tepid reaction from the remainder of the golf world. As for McIlroy? You can count him in the latter camp.
“Look, I’d love to have seven majors instead of five, that sounds great,” McIlroy said with a chuckle. “But I’m a traditionalist, I’m a historian of the game. We have four major championships. You know, if you want to see what five major championships looks like, look at the women’s game. I don’t know how well that’s went for them.”
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Yes, McIlroy admitted, the tension between disruptors and traditionalists is generally the theme of pro golf in early-2026. Generally speaking, there might be no “right” answers … just not in this instance.
“It’s the Players. It doesn’t need to be anything else,” McIlroy said. “Like I would say it’s got more of an identity than the PGA Championship does at the minute. So like from an identity standpoint, I think the Players has got it nailed. It stands on its own without the label, I guess.”
Indeed, that might be the case as the golf world enters another go-round at Pebble Beach. But it might not stay that way for long. Few things do on the modern PGA Tour.
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