The 2025 season will be beginning with new things for Rory McIlroy. The Northern Irishman has started planning how he will tackle the next season, and it comes with a few changes. The first is that the four-time major champion is changing his swing after being in the business for over a decade. He underwent aggressive only drive-shot training for three weeks straight and showed at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship that it has certainly improved.

This may, in turn, affect his 10-year-long major drought as former PGA Tour golfer and now analyst Smylie Kaufman noted in his recent podcast, the Smylie Kaufman Show. He admired his passion for being active on the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour, and despite being winless in majors, he made efforts for different events too. While talking about his swing change, Kaufman expressed, “Who’s to say that he can’t pick off three or four more [majors] if he can’t get his swing exactly the way he wants it?” Another change that McIlroy will make in the 2025 season is to reduce the number of events he played this year.

The 26-time PGA Tour winner played 25 events on the PGA and DP World Tour, including the Olympics. But in the 2025 season, he will surely be out of the four events he participated in this year. As usual, he will not play in The Sentry as he starts the season with the DP World Tour in Dubai.

Alarmingly, he will miss the Cognizant Classic, and the Valero Texas Open, which he played before the Masters to get in the groove, but it didn’t benefit him as he finished T22, RBC Heritage, and the first playoff event, the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Kaufman opined that this shorter schedule, “It’s smart; he played too much.” 

A shorter schedule does help the pros at times as being out there on the course almost every week for most of the year can be exhausting, both physically and mentally. McIlroy explained the reason for missing the playoff event that despite finishing T68 in the 70-hole golfer’s field, his rank on the FedExCup Rankings only moved down one spot, alluding that it didn’t really impact anything. This is where the problem for the PGA Tour may start, as even Kaufman noted.

How can Rory McIlroy’s decision affect the PGA Tour negatively?

The PGA Tour was already heading down the lane where the TV rating for its various events was declining. Even events like the PLAYERS Championship saw lower viewership despite Scottie Scheffler winning the golden trophy. Now, with McIlroy planning to opt out of the first playoff event, Smylie Kaufman explained, “Having Rory McIlroy say that there has to be alarms going off at PGA Tour headquarters saying we have to change our playoff structure, not next year, now!” Even Scottie Scheffler found the format silly, as he couldn’t understand it for the better part.

Kaufman pressed that it was a big deal because the PGA Tour cannot afford to have one of their top players skip an elevated event and cautioning the sponsor about the world no. 3 isn’t interested in teeing up at St. Jude’s anymore. The PGA Tour lost Wells Fargo, the contract with RBC expired, and even the Shriners Children’s Open will not be the title sponsor in 2025.

So, for the TV rating and to keep the sponsors on the PGA Tour, the league has to make some changes to have best players at least participate in the elevated events and not skip them. Rory McIlroy’s changes for the 2025 season may give him some good results at the majors, or he may follow the same pattern as he has been for the last 10 years.