PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp is not rushing to race the NFL to the market. Instead, he believes the Tour cannot build its media strategy entirely around the NFL, as the league is 'one-of-one'.

"Listen, I think the NFL is one-of-one. It's an amazing business and product. You can't really plan your rights around what they'll do," Rolapp said while speaking with CNBC at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on Thursday. Josh Carpenter, a journalist for the Sports Business Journal, reported the same in a clip posted on X.

The NFL's current 11-year deal with CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN/ABC and Amazon is worth roughly $110 billion, and the league has spent 2026 trying to renegotiate pieces of it years ahead of its 2029-30 opt-out window.

And it's expected that when the NFL comes back to market, the total package can touch $180 billion, according to Rob Sheard's report. So, there's simply less left over for everyone else fighting for the same ad dollars and affiliate fees.

So, in February, Rolapp said he was open to early talks to get ahead of the NFL’s next rights push. At the time, Rolapp believed there was uncertainty in the sports rights. But he did mention that it wasn't just because of the NFL but overall changes in media as well.

Months later, he seems relaxed about a new deal. In fact, PGA Tour's deals may take up to four years to take place. "Our deals go through '30. Um, we may go early, we may not. We haven't really had those discussions yet," he said.

Rolapp said the board is currently working on the massive competitive overhaul it approved in June. Starting in 2028, the Tour is shifting to a two-series structure — a top-tier Championship Series and a lower Challenger Series.

Rolapp wants to finish building that product before he tries to sell it 

"I think the first step we're just finishing, which is, just get the competitive model right so you know what you're actually going to be in the market with."

He says he pulled in both the Tour's existing media partners and the ones it doesn't have yet.

"We invited the partners we had — CBS, NBC, others — but also the partners we didn't have — digital streamers and others," Rolapp said, describing the pitch he gave them: a blank sheet of paper, and the question of what they'd build if they were starting from scratch.

On where that leaves streaming, Rolapp isn't picking a side. The Tour already has a PGA Tour Live deal with ESPN. And he's open to putting more inventory there — but not at the expense of linear TV, which still delivers the majority of golf's audience.

"You need a very good digital strategy, but at the same time, you need a very good linear strategy because linear's not going anywhere," he said. "It's still where you aggregate the bulk of your audiences. So it's not an either-or, it's an and."

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Written by

Md Saife Fida

Edited by

Siddharth Shirwadkar