The PGA Tour front office perennially makes tweaks to the its tournament schedule and the FedEx Cup Playoffs but more seismic shifts tend to start with the most invested stakeholders of them all: the players and the fans.

Last month, the PGA Tour unveiled plans to overhaul its ecosystem, which includes shrinking tournament field sizes, reducing the number of available tour cards and tightening pathways to membership from the Korn Ferry Tour to Monday qualifying.

Beginning in 2026, only 100 players will retain fully exempt status through the FedEx Cup points list, down from 125 (the case since 1983), with those finishing in the 100-110 range receiving conditional status and the opportunity for roughly 15 full-field starts. Additionally, the number of Tour cards awarded to Korn Ferry Tour graduates will shrink from 30 to 20, and field sizes for many events, including marquee tournaments like The Players Championship, will be slimmed down with at least a dozen fewer players in the field.

These far-reaching changes, proposed by the PGA Tour’s Player Advisory Council, were approved by the Policy Board ushering in a new epoch of professional golf. The influence wielded by the tour’s councils is not merely symbolic—they have proven integral in shaping the future of the sport.

“It was unanimous across the board what we need to do to present a better product and something better for our fans, for our events, our sponsors. Redefining what a tour pro is, streamlining that,” Tiger Woods said, during a press conference in the Bahamas at the Hero World Challenge.

Today, the PGA Tour announced the formation of a brand new advisory group. The Creator Council consisting of popular content producers such as Wesley and George Bryan, Roger Steele, Erik Anders Lang and Paige Spiranac, all of whom teed it up at the Creator Classic sponsored by Blackstone (the outdoor griddle brand) back in August. Sixteen social media personalities played the back nine at East Lake Golf Club ahead of the Tour Championship in an event that aired live on the Golf Channel, ESPN+, Peacock and YouTube with Pro Shop Studios partnering with PGA Tour Entertainment to handle on-ground and broadcast production. The event’s YouTube view count alone surpassed 2.5 million, with an additional 2.8 million views coming from the participants’ individual YouTube channels.

The plan is to create a forum that brings a substantive set of voices together to discuss how to reach the next generation of fans and make it easier for content creators to work with the PGA Tour. Led by Andy Weitz, the PGA Tour’s chief marketing and communications officer, this Generation Z attuned think tank will convene monthly to strategize on future editions of the Creator Classic and also tackle broader topics including fan engagement strategies, collaborative content opportunities, PGA Tour media regulations and event/broadcast enhancements.

The announcement of the Creator Council is likely to elicit its share of skepticism and even snark from the golf social media community, questioning what the Tour truly aims to achieve by convening this group of influencers. Yet, the Tour appears undeterred, embracing potential critiques as part of its effort to evolve and better serve its audience.

“It all starts with fans, and we are willing to absorb some of that skepticism and engage people who might have a point of view that will make us better if it serves our fans,” Weitz said.

There’s a direct thread between the PGA Tour Fan Forward initiative, a comprehensive research project the tour initiated this past summer that is still ongoing and the Creator Council’s efforts to engage with fans. The Tour reached out to 15,000 core fans in June and July to get a read on all aspects of fandom, how they felt about the tour and what drove their behavior, with a goal of evolving to meet them on their terms to buoy their engagement. Phase two widened the focus and sample size with 30,000 more casual fans responding to a survey. Phase three, launched before Thanksgiving, tests tactics around competition format changes, broadcast innovation, how to produce more compelling player content and expectations around the tournament experience and onsite activations to enhance the product. It’s still early in the process but the goal is to take that feedback into account and evolve accordingly.

“We’re still at the very beginning of our fan forward initiative, processing what we are hearing but it is clear to us that they have ideas about how the actual competition format itself can evolve and there is a lot of learnings we can take from other sports on that front,” Weitz revealed, adding that core fans also have suggestions for improving the television viewing experience, which they intend to explore with their broadcast partners.