Brian Rolapp did not come to the PGA Tour to do things the way it has always done them.
The former NFL chief media officer, now PGA Tour CEO, appeared on The Rich Eisen Show last week and said the Tour’s new social media policy was built directly on what he saw work at the league.
“You’ll recognize this from our NFL playbook,” Rolapp told Eisen.
Rolapp spent 22 years at the NFL as its chief media and business officer, engineering the league’s $111 billion rights deals and spearheading the push toward digital platforms. He left for the PGA Tour last summer after being widely viewed within the league as a potential successor to Roger Goodell, and his pitch for why professional golf should rethink its relationship with social media is rooted entirely in what he built at the NFL.
Golf participation in the United States is up 38 to 39 percent since COVID, Rolapp noted on the Eisen show, with nearly half that growth coming from players under 35 — a demographic that barely watches linear television and spends the bulk of its sports consumption time on phones and social platforms.
“There’s so many stories to tell,” Rolapp said. “And I think a better social media policy, more YouTube, better Instagram presence is going to help us do that.”
Per Front Office Sports, the updated policy gives players considerably more room to work with.
The limit on video footage players can post increases from 2 minutes to 3 minutes. Players can now post broadcast footage from six holes at the end of a round’s TV window instead of just one, totaling up to a minute of highlights. After events conclude, players can use up to eight minutes of broadcast footage per video and 120 minutes across their entire channel — double the previous limits of five minutes and 60 minutes, respectively. Content filmed at Tour sites on non-competition days is unlimited. And perhaps most significantly, players no longer have to hand over ownership of their entire YouTube channel to the PGA Tour, which was always the most indefensible part of the old policy and the detail that drew the loudest criticism from players who were trying to build audiences.
The Tour is keeping its YouTube Content ID stake, meaning it will still collect AdSense revenue when competition footage appears in a player’s video, so established creators are still giving something up every time they post. But removing the channel ownership requirement is the part that will actually matter to players with established audiences.
Looming over all of this is Bryson DeChambeau.
Since leaving for LIV Golf, DeChambeau has built an enormous YouTube following, with his channel approaching 2.7 million subscribers by doing exactly what the Tour’s old rules made nearly impossible for players still on the circuit. LIV was far more permissive with content, and DeChambeau took full advantage. He told FOS earlier this year that building a career entirely around YouTube and the majors would be “incredibly viable” if the Tour failed to modernize. DeChambeau’s LIV contract expires later this year as the league faces the end of its Saudi funding and an uncertain path forward.
Whether the updated rules go far enough to bring DeChambeau back remains to be seen, but for younger players trying to build a following while competing on Tour, the changes seem a genuine upgrade over what existed before. And Rolapp, who said publicly within weeks of taking the job that golf was “underrepresented in media” and growing the Tour’s digital footprint would be a central priority, told Eisen this policy has been in the works for nearly a year.
“We really put the gas on it in the last six months of how do you actually embrace those platforms and show more PGA Tour events on the platforms where people are,” he added.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.