Qualifying for the PGA Tour through Q-School or the Web.com Tour used to give you playing privileges for one entire year on the PGA Tour—this is not true anymore. Let me explain. Earning those cards simply allows you to play in some west coast early season events. Following the west coast swing the PGA Tour has a “reshuffle” of your status based entirely on your earning in those events. For example if you miss those cuts your status may drop from a top ten to over 40 and shut you out of the Florida swing—then subsequent reshuffles occur following the Masters, The Players, The U.S. Open and the final reshuffle follows the British Open. There are 36 ways of being exempt to play in a PGA Tour event. This allows older players who perhaps have won events in the past but their games and status otherwise would not continue to allow them playing privileges. Many of these 36 ways are very forgiving to those veterans to say the least.
The players own and control the tour. They set the code of conduct, the way tournaments are structured and who gets to play. It is obvious to me that in the last decade the current players have made it more and more difficult for minimally exempt players to even play in events. The older tour players have seen to that. Is it right? Is it wrong? This is a matter of opinion of course those opinions are 180 degrees apart. I feel for both sides the older players want to keep playing for the big bucks and the way they can do that is to make it very tough on the new guys trying to start making their living on the tour by in essence shutting them out of many events. It’s a tough call. I weigh in favor of the young guns. If the tour becomes more and more of a closed fraternity the career aspirations of high school and college golfers will in effect suppress their dreams of playing on the tour. I want to see “open” events truly be “open”. Let’s reduce the number of exemptions to a realistic number and truly make the PGA Tour career in reach for more.