Brooks Koepka has won nine times on the PGA Tour. Photo courtesy of PGA TOUR.
JAMIE HEALY | STAFF REPORTER | jdhealy1@butler.edu
Overtime, or “OT,” is an opinion column series where the Collegian takes national sports headlines or polarizing topics and gives them a Butler-centric angle.
It is officially time for the 2026 PGA Tour season. However, the start of the season has been overshadowed by the announcement of the return of nine-time PGA Tour winner and five-time major championship winner Brooks Koepka.
New PGA Tour CEO, Brian Rolapp, sent a memo to players and fans discussing the addition of a new returning member program and the reinstatement of Koepka. In the memo, Rolapp outlined the reasons for the program as a way to bring back players who had left the Tour, but still achieved measurable success in the game of golf over the last four seasons.
Only players who left the tour and have won at least one major championship between the years of 2022 and 2025 are eligible for this program, which is currently a temporary, one-time-only window that closes on Feb. 2.
In addition to Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Cameron Smith and Jon Rahm are eligible to return through the newly-adapted program.
All four of these players compete in the Saudi-backed LIV Golf League, which formed as a breakaway, rival league in 2022. While DeChambeau, Smith and Rahm have committed to LIV through the 2026 season, Koepka announced that he would be leaving LIV in December of 2025.
After meeting with Rolapp, Koepka was able to return to the PGA Tour but will face consequences for leaving. This includes the forfeiture of player equity shares for the next five years, in addition to being ineligible for the $100 million FedEx Cup bonus pool in 2026. Additionally, Koepka will be making a $5 million donation to a charity of the PGA Tour’s choice.
Even with the small number of eligible players for reinstatement, this will hopefully be the first step towards unification between the two leagues.
In June 2023, LIV and the PGA Tour announced a merger, but three seasons later, there is still no real plan for a resolution.
As a result, the two leagues continue to exist as separate entities, and players on either tour do not play with those in the other league except for the four major championships each season.
Emily Walsh, a sophomore speech, language and hearing sciences major, believes that fans want to see the best players in the world together and that the non-golf side of both leagues distracts from what really matters.
“When the business side is bleeding into it and restricts who is playing each other, it makes me less likely to watch,” Walsh said. “I want to focus on the sport and see the best players playing against each other.”
Viewership numbers back up this sentiment as well. In 2025, the highest viewership for a LIV event was a mere 484,000, while the PGA Tour saw a 22% increase in views for the entire season, including almost 4.5 million viewers for the season-ending TOUR Championship.
If fans are excited to watch stars like Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood duel any given week on the Tour, bringing back other marketable phenoms like DeChambeau or Koepka can only help the sport’s popularity.
Sophomore engineering major Finn Reilly contends that not only will fans enjoy seeing players return, but this pathway also provides a way for the PGA Tour to gauge whether or not other LIV players should be extended the offer.
“I see this as a smart trial period,” Reilly said. “If Brooks takes a penalty and starts to play well on the PGA Tour, the [PGA Tour] can look at a Joaquin Niemann or somebody like that and give them a chance to return on the Tour.”
If the PGA Tour is serious about the best players in the world playing against each other every week, this pathway is the first step to ensuring the goal truly comes to fruition.
However, there are some detractors who believe LIV has presented the game in a way that matches how some casual players play.
Senior neuroscience major Grant Gilsenan, an avid golf fan and golfer himself, sees the attempts made by LIV to change the way fans enjoy the action as a positive for the sport not seen on the PGA Tour.
“I think the team aspect [of] LIV makes the game of golf more exciting,” Gilsenan said. “It gets the players more involved with one another, and I think it’s really awesome for people like me to see because I can relate to it.”
The team element, which is only seen in international competitions like the Presidents Cup or the Ryder Cup, is a potential innovation from LIV that could help the PGA Tour draw in new fans. If there is a merger, the idea of team competition more than once a year can help the PGA Tour continue to show off players’ personalities and their risk-taking abilities.
Overall, Koepka’s return to the PGA Tour is very good for the health of the sport. Fans will have another reason to watch when he returns to competition beginning Jan. 29 at the Farmers Insurance Open.
Hopefully, in a not-so-distant future, fans will get to once again enjoy a unified tour, where all of the best in the world compete against one another every week.
