At The Turn - Golf Podcast · Joe Simons & Nick Heidelberger

2025 PGA Championship Preview: We Fix Men's Golf Most Boring Major

·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

Only three PGA professionals have finished top 40 in the PGA Championship since 2000.

They start where golf arguments usually start: with a ranking. The PGA Championship gets called the fourth most important men's major tournament, which lands more like a jab than a compliment, and that sets up a preview that quickly turns into a case against the tournament's current shape. Then they decide to fix it. The complaint is plain enough: the event feels stuck, the identity is muddy, and losing the Dell Match Play took away one of the few places where the PGA could lean into something different. Instead of sitting in that complaint, they land on a specific answer and argue that the PGA Championship should be a match play event, with no real panic about the sport surviving the switch. The conversation works because they keep drilling into the mechanics, not just the idea, and they talk through how a 156-player field could be trimmed after 36 holes, seeded, and sent into rounds of match play that would give the first two days real tension. Nick notes that he worked for one of the PGA of America sections, so there is a quick disclosure before they keep swinging, and Joe keeps needling him in that easy host way that makes the whole thing feel like two people talking through a bad tee time and a real idea at the same time. The tone stays light. Even when they are arguing for a wholesale tournament redesign, they do it with the loose, self-aware rhythm they use for everything else, which is part golf talk and part clubhouse gripe. The seeding idea gets proper attention. They walk through a bracket that would start with matchups after stroke play, move through quarterfinals, then semifinals, and finish with a true Sunday one-on-one, and they make the case that this would put pressure back into the opening rounds instead of treating them like a warm-up. Rory comes up as the test case. Their point is that a player could be three under with holes left and still have to chase because the match-play cutoff would matter more than the old comfort of simply surviving to the weekend. That is the whole trick. They take a familiar major and turn it into a format debate that actually says something about why certain tournaments feel interchangeable, and they never let the idea get too tidy or too reverent. It stays pretty dry. But the dryness is the joke, and it gives the episode a very specific rhythm: complaint, fix, case for the fix, then the refusal to pretend golf's weird little design choices are not half the fun.

As heard by us

A PGA Championship preview that makes a clear case for giving the event a sharper identity.

Nick Heidelberger and Joe Simons use a PGA Championship preview to argue that the event could use a clearer identity. Their case for match play gives the discussion structure, and the outline they sketch, from 156 players to 16 after 36 holes and then seeded matches, keeps the…

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You want a PGA Championship preview that quickly turns into a fix-it session.

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