Deere Run’s Weak Field Comes at The Wrong Time For The PGA

If the PGA Tour and its players believe they are in a battle for golf dominance with their LIV Tour rivals, they’re not acting like it this week at TPC Deere Run.

As the stage is set for the second LIV Tour event, starting Thursday at Pumpkin Ridge, all of the PGA Tour’s best are ceding the weekend spotlight to it.

Not one of the world’s top 50 players in the Official World Golf Rankings will tee it up at the PGA Tour’s annual stop at the John Deere Classic.

There’s an element of logic to their absence. Not only is the course, outside the Quad Cities area in far western Illinois, relatively inaccessible by Tour standards, its $7.1 million purse is among the Tour’s smallest.

At Pumpkin Ridge, by stark contrast, the 48 LIV Tour guys will be playing for a $20 million individual purse plus an additional $5 million split among the top three teams.

Judging strictly by the names in the field, the Pumpkin Ridge event has it all over the Deere.

The 48 players in the LIV Tour lineup include eight who rank among the top 50. Those are Dustin Johnson (17), Brooks Koepka (19), Louis Oosthuizen (21), Abraham Ancer (22), Bryson DeChambeau (31), Kevin Na (33), Talor Gooch (38), and Patrick Reed (39).

By contrast, the highest-ranked player in the Deere field is Webb Simpson, world No. 58. Although all of the world’s top 15 players are affiliated with the PGA Tour, not one of them saw the idea of upholding their tour’s honor against the insurgent Tour to be important enough to merit showing up in Silvis, Illinois.

In fact, only nine PGA Tour pros who rank among the game’s top 100 will be in Silvis. There are 21 LIV Tour players in the top 100, and obviously, they’ll all be at Pumpkin Ridge.

By that simplest of yardsticks, the LIV Tour field is notably stronger than the PGA Tour field. But it is possible to run the numbers differently and come to a different conclusion.

For example, the average world ranking of the 48 LIV event participants is 255th. The average world ranking of the top 48 players competing at TPC Deere Run is 157th, nearly 100 places higher.

But that’s due in part to the fact that three of the LIV Golf players – Chase Koepka, James Piot, and Eugenio Chacarra – rank outside the top 1,500.

Top stars are skipping Deere Run

In fact, the absence of all of the game’s top stars from Deere Run means that the John Deere field is even more heavily larded with wannabees.

Of the 150 payers who will be teeing it up Thursday, 30 – that’s 20 percent of the field – rank outside the world’s top 1,000.

This doesn’t mean that the LIV Tour players are destined to outshine the Deere Run group this weekend, either in performance or audience interest.

The Deere Classic will get network TV exposure on CBS and the Golf Channel, as well as on ESPN+ and Sirius XM Radio.

The LIV Tour event is only available via the LIV Tour’s own website or Youtube.

Thus far the PGA Tour pros have thoroughly outplayed the LIV Tour guys in comparable events. When the LIV Tour debuted earlier in June in London, the field average was several strokes higher than the average for the concurrent PGA Tour event at the RBC Canadian.

Two weeks ago when the best of the LIV and PGA Tours collided on the same course at the U.S. Open, the PGA Tour guys again thoroughly outplayed LIV Tour representatives.

If that trend continues, the impression will rapidly take hold that LIV events constitute at best a minor league. But the prospect of that happening is hindered by the mediocre quality of the competition at Deere Run.

The independent contractor status of Tour pros obviously makes it impossible for the Tour to require players to take part in any event.  For that purpose, it needs the cooperation of the players themselves.

Still, it would have been in the interests of the PGA Tour to do what it could to ensure that each of its events scheduled in competition with LIV Tour events features at minimum a representative field.

The John Deere Classic falls far short of living up to that standard.