Is next week’s PGA Tour field a problem? Or just the truth?

Next week’s PGA Tour event, the Cadillac Championship, is the latest in a series of Signature Events – a limited field, $20 million free for all 99% of the pros who want to play. And there’s good news for that huge amount – technically, the two sponsor releases haven’t been completed yet.

Usually, on the Saturday before, most fields of the Signature Event are set. You have last year’s top 50, a handful of winners this season, 10 unranked top performers this year and five recent top performers. On top of that, as has been argued, there are always four sponsor exemptions which, quietly, can always be decided until the last minute.

The reason is obvious: if a player can qualify on his own, it is better to see what is best for them and their game than to use the sponsor’s exemption. For patrons, it’s a good situation, too, because their list of choices is always longer than four. Any player from the sponsor’s unpublished priority level who plays their way allows Sponsor Choice No. 5 to join the forum.

This happened to RBC and its post-Masters Heritage tournament. During Masters week, Max Homa was listed as a sponsor on the Tour’s internal roster until he played well enough at Augusta National that he qualified for the Heritage without needing a sponsor’s invitation. It works — Homa comes in, and RBC gets to invite one of their favorites. They went with Wyndham Clark, Tony Finau, Billy Horschel and Marco Penge – their order not revealed.

This coverage is important for next week’s tournament, the newly created Signature Event at the Tour’s classic course, Trump National Doral. Only Joel Dahmen and Max Greyserman are on the sponsor’s exemption list right now – both reasonable choices, neither of whom will be available at the last minute like Homa did, after missing out on this week’s title at the Zurich Classic. They will be joined by two others, which will be decided on Sunday evening, the selection has not been finalized because … there are big names about to leave the position, and few big-name players like to play, period.

Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele, Bob MacIntyre, Ludwig Aberg and Matt Fitzpatrick – all ranked in the world’s top 15 – will skip next week in Miami. (For McIlroy, it will be the second Signature Event skipped this season.) All in all, it’s the most significant voluntary departure of talent any Signature Event has seen to date, and there’s a very obvious reason: most pros are fine with playing three events in a row. But some don’t really want to play a big tournament in that third week.

As with the PGA Tour Rubik’s Cube problem, there is no one thing to blame for this issue. And once you’ve solved one side of the cube – like getting a new, bigger sponsor commitment. That’s great! — you can easily disturb other parties. Simply put, the Cadillac competition was non-existent last year. When professionals make their annual commitment lists, this place sounds more like a surprise than anything else. It also takes place directly before another Signature Event, the Truist Championship at Quail Hollow, which sits directly before the PGA Championship in Philadelphia. It feels like skipping when other weeks don’t.

In general, most top pros settle on a schedule of 22 to 26 events. That way, they don’t play more than half of the calendar year. Brian Rolapp is acutely aware of this number, and so are his brand’s billionaire investors. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, one of the pro game’s biggest investors, also knows a lot. Rory McIlroy bluntly told him that “26 weeks” is the highest of those at the top during a meeting a few years ago. A tour that gets top pros playing 22 to 26 times can be a good commercial product, as long as those 22 to 26 events … are the same events. But that’s still a time puzzle: what events fit into that schedule of 22 to 26 events, and How do you place them throughout the January to August calendar to get McIlroy to appear as many times as possible. Attaching a Signature Event the week before a Signature Event that lasts a week before is big not in the future of the Tour. You can count on that.

The distribution of these high events — “Track 1” events, as they will be called in the future — will not appease everyone, but until they are strengthened in reasonable places in the calendar, there will be consequences to go down as high professionals to skip voluntarily. That’s to say nothing of the Texas-based players who want to play for two weeks follows the PGA Championship, the CJ Cup Byron Nelson and the Charles Schwab Challenge. Scottie Scheffler will be defending his title in the beginning – and in the PGA Championship, too – but he is not in the field of the Truist Championship, another $ 20 million for free a week before the PGA. Different professionals have different priorities – we know that. But it revealed a surprising fact: between the Masters and the PGA Championship, three Signature Events will be played. McIlroy and Scheffler have never once competed against each other.

It can be confusing to keep track of who is in and who is out during this especially signature time of the season, but the results of these fields – who you want to enter and when – combined with the randomness of fan favorites to hit a difficult patch, is what makes the construction of the schedule a volatile business. That’s what makes Brian Rolapp’s job especially tricky right now, when sponsor involvement, academic commitment and competitive structure are all trivial. The status quo works in many ways, but it relies heavily on star golfers. Any week when that is cut short by those golfers simply not showing up is even more pressing.