PGA Tour: When Does Last Season End and This Season Begin?

In case you haven’t heard, and my best guess is that you haven’t, the PGA Tour season began last weekend in Kapalua, Hawaii, where Jonathan Byrd became the first American in a decade to win the PGA Tour’s season opener in Hawaii, or was it the final event of the 2010 season, or does it really matter anymore?

Being that the 2010 season ended just three weeks ago, most players had enough time to enjoy some Christmas ham, hand out a few ridiculously expensive gifts (thank you Tiger Woods for the 200 percent purse increases), hit a few buckets of balls and jump right into the 2011 season, all while the entire sports watching country is concerned with nothing other than NFL football.

Sometime over the past two decades, the PGA Tour has morphed into one long, continuous season.

There is no season finale and there is no true opening day in professional golf, because the two are separated by a mere three weeks.

Would anyone even bat an eye when the football season ended if the next season began less than a month later?

A wise man once said that anything becomes normal if it happens often enough, and the PGA Tour is severely depleting its product by turning golf into a normal, everyday occurrence.

For four days per week and more than 45 weeks per year, you can turn on the television and watch some kind of PGA Tour or PGA Tour-related golf tournament.

Who cares if you miss a few tournaments, there will be forty more events airing over the next 12 months.  Heck, missing a few tournaments might even do you some good; after all, how many spouses would put up with their husband or wife watching 12 hours of golf per week for 49 weeks per year?

That’s 588 hours of your spare time that will end a marriage faster than an affair with an Orlando Perkins waitress.

Golf needs to put some kind of value on the season, and there are only two ways of accomplishing that:

1) DO NOT go head to head with the NFL.

Going head to head with the NFL is a pointless exercise for any sport, let alone a sport with a popularity rating that falls somewhere in between NHL Hockey (yes, the NHL does still exist) and greyhound racing.  

2) Create a premium on watching golf.

Start the season right after the Super Bowl and end it in early September.

The only way to place a premium on the golf season is to make watching golf something of a novelty.

Cut the season down to seven months, have a five-month offseason and then start the season with a bang each year after sports fans have had a week to cure their Super Bowl Sunday hangovers.

The Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup aside, what takes place within the golf world between late September and mid-February is virtually irrelevant to most sports fans. 

Diehard golf fans will tune in to most events throughout the course of the season.  However, true diehard golf fans are diminishing by the day and are not the ones that really move the needle for the PGA Tour.  It’s the general sports fans who tune in for the big-time events that boost the ratings.

There are currently a handful of PGA Tour events in a dire financial state.  They are either sponsors-less, or about to lose their title sponsors.

Not to sound cold hearted, as most PGA Tour events bring in a lot of revenue and jobs and charitable donations to local economies, but for the product as a whole, would anyone mind if the PGA Tour simply allowed some of these struggling events to follow their natural course into extinction?

The way the American economy is going, the PGA Tour might just be forced into a seven months season in the very near future, and that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.