‘Peculiar move:’ Rory McIlroy left with more questions than answers by LIV Golf’s change

LIV Golf’s latest move stunned many in the golf world, but it left Rory McIlroy with more questions than answers.

On Tuesday, LIV Golf announced a surprising change to its competitive format by shifting all events to 72 holes, effective immediately. The move puts the breakaway league more in line with the competitive structure of pro golf and should clear one of the hurdles to gaining entry into the Official World Golf Ranking, which would provide LIV players with the world rankings points required to gain access to major championships.

However, McIlroy, who spoke on Wednesday ahead of the 2025 Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship at Yas Links, is uncertain that the drastic change from the rebel league will have the desired impact.

“I think it’s a peculiar move because I think they could have got ranking points with three rounds,” McIlroy said. “I don’t think three rounds versus four rounds is what was holding them back.

“It certainly puts them more in line with traditional golf tournaments than what we’ve all done. It brings them back into not really being a destructor and sort of falling more in line with what everyone else does. But if that’s what they felt they needed to do to get the ranking points, I guess that’s what they had to do.”

LIV Golf’s move to 72 holes has been rumored for some time, but it is no less of a stunner. The shift to 72 holes goes against the branding and initial selling points for the league, which aimed to streamline the viewing experience with a 54-hole, shotgun-start tournament that would make golf more digestible in the age of short attention spans. However, LIV could never overcome the fact that OWGR status granted the league access to major championship eligibility, and the league needs as many of its players as possible in the major fields to try to lure new players and carve out a healthy chunk of the pro golf market share.

While LIV’s shift to 72 holes might be the key to gaining access to the OWGR, McIlroy isn’t sure how much that will help the league now after years of its players plummeting in the world rankings.

“I think what’s hard is you’ve got the LIV guys, and say potentially they get World Rankings, but because their strength of fields are going to be so weak because a lot of the guys have fallen already in the rankings because they have not had ranking points for so long, I don’t know if the ranking points are really going to benefit them,” McIlroy said. “It will be interesting to see how it plays out.”

To McIlroy’s point, LIV currently only has three players — Tyrrell Hatton, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed — in the top 50 of the world rankings. Jon Rahm is currently ranked 71st. However, a change made to the OWGR’s algorithm three years ago might lessen the blow to LIV. The OWGR used to calculate a tournament’s strength of field based solely on its own rankings. But in 2022, the OWGR changed its algorithm to include a metric called “Strokes Gained World Rating,” which factors not only your finish in the tournament but the scores you shoot relative to the field you are in. GOLF’s Sean Zak wrote a detailed explainer of the metric when the news dropped in 2022.

Currently, World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler leads the OWGR in Strokes Gained World Rating at 3.547. But DeChambeau, who is the 23rd-ranked player, is second at 2.893. Rahm is fifth behind McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood. You can see how that change will help LIV Golf fields get more points than they would if the strength of field was based solely on the OWGR ranking.

The OWGR’s position has been consistent on LIV Golf since the league first applied for access. The “closed shop” nature of the league and the limits on its competition (54 holes, no cuts, smaller field sizes) made it hard to distribute points fairly.

Now that LIV has shifted to 72 holes and attempted to make it more of an “open shop” by giving more spots via the Promotions Event and International Series, the league’s pathway to the OWGR should be expedited.

Time will tell how the move changes things for the breakaway league and the fractured state of professional golf.

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