Even as Thomas Detry attempted to ruin the WM Phoenix Open last week by blowing the rest of the field out of the water and depriving us of what would have been a tight finish between Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas and a few others, I had the same thought I had the week before while watching Pebble Beach: This is so much better than anything I watched in January.

I was not alone. After a month of dismal ratings, the Tour killed it at Pebble and had another great week in Phoenix, and when you compare it to the January slate, the viewership increase was in the multiple millions. There are always mitigating factors when it comes to ratings, and the biggest one here is that the January tournaments went head-to-head with the NFL playoffs, but the fact remains that the signature events are a million times more entertaining than the rest of the schedule.

There are plenty of good reasons why the Tour added this “upper tier” of events (although pretty much all of them boil down to filtering more money to the best players so they don’t defect to LIV) but it’s also created a rich/poor feast/famine dynamic within the actual tournament schedule. Some events, like the Phoenix Open itself, manage to maintain a certain status despite not being signature events; in Phoenix’s case, the wild atmosphere at the venue, the fact that it’s a convenient stop between Pebble and Riviera to nab great players and the tie-in with Super Bowl Sunday all help. But I can guarantee you that when the Genesis ends and the Tour goes to Mexico, the field quality, the ratings and our interest are going down the drain.

All of it leads to a nagging question: Why even have the lower tier events? What if the Tour did a massive overhaul and just adopted the F1 system, where there are 24 events every year, the best drivers show up at all of them, and there’s no real down time? At the risk of this just becoming LIV Golf, I would like to note that I’m not advocating for team golf or shotgun starts or, god forbid, music. I don’t even care about limiting fields—make them 150 strong, or 130 if you actually think that’s going to help pace of play. But maybe there is something to learn from LIV when it comes to shrinking the schedule.

And sure, this is armchair spitballing, but imagine how great each tournament would be, and how the off weeks would build anticipation. Twenty-four events is probably a bit much, but subtracting the four majors, it feels like an every-other-week schedule of 20 events would fit nicely into the calendar, and you could still take November and December off so you don’t get mollywhomped by football. Make the players play at least 16 of the 20, have a more intuitive system of relegation and run Korn Ferry Tour events in the off weeks to get your 300k viewers. It might even make the Tour Championship feel more meaningful.

Doesn’t it feel like this is where we’re headed anyway, except in a very piecemeal, incremental way? Why not just rip off the band-aid, overhaul the system and lose the least relevant and least entertaining parts of the schedule while securing the best players and best courses? Screw it, while we’re here, these are the 20 events you can play on current Tour courses:

Kapalua, Torrey Pines, Pebble, Riviera, Phoenix, Bay Hill, Sawgrass for the Players, Hilton Head, Quail Hollow, Colonial, TPC Craig Ranch, Muirfield Village, somewhere Canadian, Scotland before the Open, River Highlands in CT, Deere Run in Illinois, Detroit/Minnesota rotation, Greensboro because I still want one close to where I live, Memphis/Maryland rotation, and somewhere nicer than East Lake for the Tour Championship. And this can all be adjusted as necessary.

Maybe you lose something in the short term this way, but you also streamline the product, ensure terrific fields in every event, and strengthen the identity of what the Tour actually is and does. All wheat, no chaff.

In short, this is a foolproof idea and there is no possible way that I, some guy eating pretzels in his shed office in North Carolina with no connection or knowledge of the business side of the proposition, has neglected to think of anything important.

FIVE TOUR THOUGHTS, PEBBLE/PHOENIX EDITION

1. Sometimes life comes at you fast, like the meme says, but in a good way. Last time, my review of the Tour season to date was one word—”oof”—but the last two weeks have been so stellar. And as much as I “joke” about Thomas Detry ruining Phoenix, I was following closely because I wrote the game story, and Detry’s final round, the last five holes in particular, was jaw-dropping. It feels like it’s been a long time since someone won that comprehensively, and the fact that it was a 32-year-old Belgian that has never won on Tour before made it that much more impressive. Sometimes a blowout can be weirdly enjoyable, and this was one of those times. Also, unless you’re Tiger Woods at the Pebble Beach U.S. Open, the truth is that there’s very rarely a true blowout in golf; Detry won by seven strokes, but as late as the 15th hole it still seemed vaguely within reach for Berger.

He was nails. As Digest’s Luke Kerr-Dineen pointed out right after, we’re going to be hearing about Detry’s Ryder Cup chances from now until September unless he literally starts shooting in the 90s; anyone who can go that low, and do it in the face of the Tour’s most raucous crowd, will make Luke Donald’s eyebrows jump to his forehead ahead of Bethpage.

Two other thoughts on Detry … one, I keep wanting to spell his name with a rogue capital T, like DeTry. I don’t know why. Two, it amuses me to no end that his Wikipedia picture comes from when he was 13 years old. (They claim it’s from 2009, when he was 26, but there’s no way the guy in the photo is a day older than 13.)

2. Speaking of BACK, do I dare get excited about Rory’s game? Do I dare buy into the notion that he’s playing “cautious” now, like Scottie Scheffler, and a few bad risks were all that was keeping him from winning 12 majors in the past decade? Do I dare love again?

I don’t know, man. But that was some mighty good golf at Pebble, the kind of comprehensive win that makes you think he’s got his head on straight and could be ready to end the drought. Yet even typing that last sentence, I felt like a dupe. He’s really changed this time!

I think I have the perfect real-life comparison for Rory not winning a major in over a decade, but I warn you that it’s nerdy. I’m not one for fantasy novels in general, but I did start reading the Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R.R. Martin after watching the first season of Game of Thrones, and was astounded by how good they were. The fifth book in the series, A Dance with Dragons, came out around when I started reading in 2011. The sixth book in the series, The Winds of Winter … is still not out. Fourteen years later, the dude has still not hit “send” on the manuscript. It’s not just that he hasn’t finished, though; it’s that for many years, we were deluded by false notions of when it would actually hit. I mean, the man’s original goal was to finish by the end of 2015. One decade ago!! He’s long since learned to stop predicting, but that hasn’t stopped fans from hatching their own theories, and then becoming disappointed when they’re wrong.

It’s all so Rory-like. He is The Winds of Winter—always promised, never arriving. (Thank you for enduring this nerdery … now I’m off to dunk my own head in a toilet.)

3. The latest sign of how good Scheffler is? It feels so weird that he just played two tournaments and didn’t win either of them. If he doesn’t win at Torrey, it’s time to start wondering if he’s DONE.

4. This mega-thread on Twitter from Michael Kim after Phoenix was so insightful and fun, and I wish every player would do something similar following a tournament. I know we overrate social media and “engagement,” but there really is no substitute for an athlete talking about his performance in earnest, sophisticated ways that don’t make him sound like a meathead, and there’s no substitute for the written word. You certainly can’t do this on TV, where you need an extremely talented interviewer to get anything beyond the most superficial sound bytes, and even a podcast is more limited than a player letting loose in text. If Michael Kim did this every week, even in bullet point format, and released the collection in a book, I would pay $10 for that book. (As Christopher Powers covered, his observations on Spieth alone were worth the price of admission.)

5. Speaking of our lunatic all-American golden boy psycho-golfer, it was a true gift to have Spieth back in contention. If the wrist surgery helps him reach his former glory and make real runs at the majors, we need to throw the surgeon a ticker tape parade in Manhattan. I somehow get more excited about Spieth than I do with Rory, even though Rory has given us a lot more meat to chew in the past five years. There’s just something irresistible about the guy, and he’s always doing something like getting stuck in a bush, having a fascinating 12-minute monologue with Greller, and then pulling off a miracle. He’s electric.

THE ABSOLUTE IRONCLAD LOCKS OF THE WEEK

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Ben Jared

Career Record: 7-53. Started off the year with an 0-fer, but the ol’ picking fingers are feeling red-hot right about now.

At the Genesis, I’m loving Collin Morikawa. The reason I’m so bullish on 2025 is that it feels like a few really big-name players who have been varying degrees of dormant for a while are all popping up again like chirping cicadas. Morikawa belongs squarely in that JT/Spieth category and this feels like his coming-out part. Plus it’s his home state, which means nothing but if you repeat it a dozen or so time it starts to acquire an almost overwhelming importance.

The seniors are playing the Chubb Classic, which is such a funny name, and the guy with the first tee time is Tim Herron, whose nickname is Lumpy. “Chubb Lumpy” and “Lumpy Chubb” are such strange, offputting, yet irresistible word combinations that I can’t possibly pick anyone else here.

At LIV Golf Adelaide, I’m rolling with hometown hero Angus “Didgeridoo” MacGuff.

THE “DUMB TAKE I KIND OF BELIEVE”

There should be a special rule called “The Commissioner’s Whim” to be used once per tournament as necessary to get rid of a drama-killing frontrunner. Thomas Detry getting in the way of a back nine Spieth/Thomas duel for the win? No problem. Jay Monahan rides a chariot out to the first tee, stares down Detry, slowly tilts his thumb downward, and he’s out of the tournament. Maybe in Phoenix the drunken mob descends on him, and you can watch it on ESPN+. We can iron out the details later.

READER EMAIL OF THE WEEK

I asked for interesting encounters with pros this week, and wow, did Owen deliver:

I was caddying for an assistant professional at my home club in Branford, CT, who made it into the 2013 Travelers Championship Monday Qualifying at Connecticut National. We got paired up with another pro and Vaughn Taylor, who maybe has the purest swing I have ever seen. Vaughn did not talk much during the round, but my pro was keeping his score. After nine holes, my guy was out of it, but Vaughn was a few under and playing really great. On the 17th tee box, an official tells Vaughn he made it off the alternate list and doesn’t have to finish the round, but he keeps playing anyway. We get to the fairway on 18, and he jars his approach shot. No celebration, no nothing! Walks up to the green and collects his ball, signs his guy’s scorecard, walks to his car, and then leaves. It turns out that at the scoring table, Vaughn broke the course record but never signed his own scorecard, so it didn’t count and was officially a WD.

Imagine playing the best round ever played on a course but you’re so good it doesn’t even matter. I just want that feeling one time.

Main Image: Mark Thompson/Getty Images