Six-time PGA Tour winner Hunter Mahan believes his former employers are potentially missing out on a handful of the top in-form college players via an overly-restrictive promotion pathway.
Since the PGA Tour University scheme changed its offering from a Korn Ferry Tour to a PGA Tour card in 2022, just one golfer per season has been able to depart college directly for the top US-based circuit, with the next best four now handed a Korn Ferry Tour card plus a place in the second round of PGA Tour Q-School.
Players six to 10 in the PGA Tour U rankings earn conditional status on the Korn Ferry Tour for the remainder of the current season only as well as being exempt into the second stage of the KFT's Q-School for the subsequent campaign.
But, for a man who spent more than a decade competing on the PGA Tour before turning his talents to coaching, Mahan wonders if Jay Monahan and co. are missing a trick by not creating a wider and more seamless transition between college and the elite pro game.
From the 42-year-old's point of view, too many players have their positive momentum halted by having to duke it out on either the Korn Ferry Tour or European Tours before finally progressing to join many of the world's absolute best.
The former University of Southern California and Oklahoma State University golfer pointed to American Football's method of ensuring that fans are continuously engaged in certain characters' stories by promoting whoever is good enough right out of the gate.
Speaking exclusively to Golf Monthly, Mahan said: "I think college players, should they really have to go to the Korn Ferry Tour for the amount of time that they sort of need to? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Should they just be allowed on tour?
"I've always been sort of a proponent of... a few guys should just be able to get their card and get on tour. The tour has the university rankings and everything. I think we have plenty of metrics to figure out who the best players are, and getting those guys cards - I think - should be easy for them to work out.
"I don't see why they're making it tougher for them to get on tour if you're a college player or whatnot. I would want to get those guys on tour as fast as possible and I want to start marketing college players and getting them on tour with those faces that they know and stories that you could lean into.
"I think you can lose momentum by guys being on the Korn Ferry Tour and then they, not disappear, but they don't have much momentum. So, I would want to get the best players out there as fast as I can."
Going on to briefly touch upon the LIV Golf League as well, Mahan suggested that the PIF-backed circuit could try to make itself "more viable" by adding a batch of leading college players - following in the footsteps of Caleb Surratt, David Puig, and Eugenio Chacarra.
However, he noted that while some will certainly consider taking the lucrative option which could be on offer, the majority of college players are looking to compete against stronger and deeper fields in order to reach the Majors.
Mahan said: "I think if you're LIV, that's where you'd be kind of looking for those young players who are really good and can come up and compete right away. That way, you're going to make your tour a little bit more viable. Getting guys that are maybe older doesn't seem to be the thing that they need to do. They need to get some youth and some energy out there.
"It's a hard sell to get them, though, because those guys want to play in Majors. They want to be in big events. Going to LIV right from college or whatnot is not really that exciting to a lot of these kids. I think they want to compete against the best players in a big way."
To back up Mahan's point, the 42-year-old highlighted the successes that Luke Clanton, Nick Dunlap, Ludvig Aberg and even Matt Fitzpatrick enjoyed as fresh-faced rookies on the PGA Tour.
The two-time Ryder Cup player feels that there could be so many potential opportunities for repeats of those success stories that are falling by the wayside due to simply not being given a chance even though they are ready right away.
Mahan said: "There's plenty of guys that, Dunlap winning as an amateur, there's just guys that you feel like those are just no-brainers - obvious. It's like 'here's your card. come out here, right?'
"And even like, we had Matt Fitzpatrick who was one of those guys that was a young European tour player, but was a stud right away as an amateur. And you're like, what are we doing, what are we waiting on, why are we making this so hard?
"I think there's plenty of guys who are just good like that that I don't need to see any more of. I'm just like, here you go, right? We want you to be a part of our tour.
"So, I think I would want to use college as a pseudo Korn Ferry Tour and create those storylines and relationships with those guys and then get those guys on tour and then create a little bit of a momentum for them - sort of like what college football does.
"We get to watch them early on and then we get to see them in the NFL quickly and there's an understanding. There's a cyclical understanding of who they are and what they're about and where they're from and their stories.
"So that's why it makes sense to me for some of those young guys to come out here right away."
