There's No Tanking in Golf

+ 2025 predictions, weekly favorites

Author

Sean Melia
January 03, 2025

Hey Everyone,

Happy New Year! 🥳 

Having New Year's Day on a Wednesday is quite the mental hurdle. Wednesday felt like Sunday, and then boom, it’s Thursday, and the PGA Tour is in Hawaii starting their new season without Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy… cool. A little more on that later…

If you’re new here, welcome (we’ve added a bunch of new subscribers)! Last Friday, I shared my Best, Worst, and Favorites from 2024.

To wrap up the year, I cooked up my 2024 rankings of the 24 courses I played in my quest. I also created my 2024 Composite Course, where I built a course using the holes I played on my quest. It’s always a fun exercise. The rankings and composite course are posted on Instagram.

Paid subscribers to the newsletter have access to my composite course post on this website, which includes some quick thoughts on each hole. You can find that here.

Let’s get to some thoughts on tanking in sports and my 2025 predictions.

If you have any results or stories that you think would be great for the newsletter. Send them to [email protected]. I’d love to highlight some high school and college golf this fall season. So if you’re connected to a program, send along results or highlights.

There’s No Tanking in Golf.

Imagine for a moment that Mark Hubbard, who was sitting on the cusp of losing his PGA Tour card last fall, was mulling over the idea of tanking in the season's final tournament.

It’s a ridiculous premise, right? How and why would a player “tank” in a golf tournament? What would it even look like? Would Hubbard putt with his sand wedge? Hit 5-iron off every tee?

That behavior would look more like a protest than tanking because tanking in professional golf is impossible.

On the flip side, the New England Patriots announced this week that rookie QB Drake Maye will start the final game of the year this Sunday. If the Pats lose their final game of the season, they would “win” the first pick in the NFL Draft. If they win the game, they will likely lose that position.

People in New England are upset. They’d like the Pats to waive the white flag on Sunday against the Buffalo Bills, nab the top pick, and sell it to the highest bidder—short-term loss for potential long-term gain. Playing Drake Maye makes that calculus a bit tougher against a Bills team that will also be playing a load of backups (and the game will still draw more eyeballs than your average PGA Tour event…).

Golf doesn’t have anything close to tanking, which is what should make it such an appealing sport. The PGA Tour should lean into this tension more because every time they do, the product improves. Players have to compete on each shot, and at the end of the season, a handful of players are battling for PGA Tour cards.

Unfortunately, the PGA Tour and NBA was running in adjacent lanes right now. Trying to figure out how to guarantee to fans that the best players will be competing. In the NBA stars sit out games to rest. In professional golf, players get to set their own schedule.

To entice star players to compete against each other more, the PGA Tour keeps pumping out high-purse events without a cut.

While those non-cut events don’t generate opportunities for players to “tank,” they can generate a sense of apathy and eliminate tension. Fewer people are watching professional golf on TV. Turning on The Sentry in Hawaii this week is a welcome respite from the cold, dark winter in Boston. But the tournament doesn’t matter. It’s probably going to happen in total sports anonymity as most people untangle themselves from the holidays and try to recalibrate their lives.

The PGA Tour should have a meaningful season-opening event that generates excitement and has every one of the best players in the field. Obviously, Scottie Scheffler can’t help getting injured on Christmas. But Rory McIlroy skips Hawaii every year, mainly because he’s playing all over the world throughout November and partly because he doesn’t like the course.

It’s nice that there’s no tanking in professional golf. But it seems there is some serious apathy, and that might be more troubling.

2025 Predictions

  1. A “Roll Back” Event will happen or be announced for 2026.

    The USGA plans to roll back the golf ball for professionals in 2028. In 2030 everyone else will play a new golf ball. We’re a year removed from the polarizing announcement, and I think the next step will be to assure all golfers that the roll back is not that scary. A 2025 event might be a little premature, considering they would need new golf balls from one or two manufacturers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the table is set for an event in 2026 to help assuage fears. I’d love to see the next Match or other contrived Showdown use rolled-back balls. Would be fascinating. Bryson, as Bryson does, already made a YouTube video playing with an old ball that would conform. The only Bryson content I’ve been able to watch.

  1. There will be no PGA Tour/LIV deal finalized in 2025.

    Long Live LIV, I’m afraid. The more time LIV is around, the more likely it is to survive. Rory said it was “dead in the water” in 2022. Now Greg Norman is out, and they seem to be adding some more serious leaders who understand how to grow a league instead of just throwing money around. It seems that the PIF is getting a bit more involved with the PGA Tour, and while things seem to be in motion, it feels like the PGA Tour’s reality in 2025 is going to be its reality in 2026 and 2027, too. Not much is going to change, and the threat of more golfers leaving for LIV will still exist.

  2. Europe will gain a stranglehold on the Ryder Cup and win at a raucous Bethpage Black.

    Obviously, we don’t know what the teams are going to look like. I’m curious about Keegan Bradley’s impact as captain while he’s also playing on the PGA Tour full-time (he’s ranked No. 12 in the world). Arnold Palmer was the last playing captain in 1963. All due respect to Bradley, he’s not Palmer. I do love the risk they took to name him, but I still wonder about the motivation for the decision. Was it reactionary because of how horrible Zach Johnson looked on Full Swing as he made his captain's pick? Would Bradley have been selected if Johnson had taken Bradley to Italy instead of, say, Rickie Fowler? I’m not so sure.

    Bethpage is going to be absolutely nuts, but I think the European team is built to win, and Luke Donald’s experience as captain in 2023 could prove pivotal. Europe also might just have better players right now, along with the recipe for winning Ryder Cups on the road this century.

  3. Michael Thorbjornsen will win on the PGA Tour.

    Hi, I’m Sean. I’ll be your driver on the Michael Thorbjornsen Bandwagon for the next 10-15 years. I think Thorbjornsen is going to win on the PGA Tour this year (I’m already on record saying he will win at least two majors in his career…). I also think he could be on the edge of making the Ryder Cup team as a captain’s pick (maybe with a Bay Stater as the captain, too…).

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When I’m not golfing…

I’m reading…

🏌️ Good stuff from Gabby Herzig on Xander Schauffele in The Atlantic.

I’m listening to…

⛳️ I love listening to the No Laying Up goals episode every year.

🎵 I consider my buddy Scott my “Music Czar.” Every year, he makes a list of his best music of 2024. Here’s his Spotify list. Pop it on and let it shuffle through songs by bands with wild names.

I’m eating…

🧑‍🍳 Slow Cooker Salsa Verde Chicken

I’m watching…

🌹 I mean, The Rose Bowl was pretty awesome…

🛢️ We started watching Landman and Bad Sisters this week. Landman is preposterous, to be honest. But Billy Bob Thornton is superb in it and it’s a glimpse into the oil industry that I didn’t know I needed. Bad Sisters is a dark comedy set in Ireland. It’s on AppleTV+, and the first two episodes are very good.

New here? Reached the bottom?

Hell Yeah.

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