How a forgotten piece of NFL historical past pushed Roger Goodell’s No. 2 to golf

In the long and storied historical past of golf industry company hopscotch, few strikes stand out like Brian Rolapp’s rent at the PGA Tour.

Mostly because few strikes have ever been so shocking.

The query looming over Rolapp’s arrival in golf wasn’t why the PGA Tour needed Rolapp, the long-time No. 2 to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. It was the reverse: Why did Rolapp need the PGA Tour?

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Consider the two sides. On one finish of the room sat Rolapp, a man who had earned a fame as perhaps the most helpful non-commissioner in professional sports activities, negotiating more than $100 billion in media rights offers and pioneering the NFL’s profitable launch of Thursday Night Football. Rolapp wasn’t just an important piece of the NFL monolith — he was, by all accounts, still ascending, having spent most of the earlier decade on the shortlist to succeed Goodell whenever the 67-year-old commissioner elected to retire.

And on the other finish of the room? The PGA Tour. An group that, until very just lately, could be best described as surprisingly bureaucratic and deeply set in its methods. A spot resurgent after beating back LIV’s offensive, but still completely not sure of how to transfer ahead. A spot ripe for change, but still mired in a very massive dose of uncertainty.

Why would Rolapp give up his function at the NFL for a job at a tour in disaster? The logic appeared questionable at best — and that was before contemplating that Rolapp was, by his own admission, not much of a golfer.

When pressed about his motives in his early interviews after taking the Tour job, Rolapp took the high street, pointing to the Tour’s power and his admiration for its leaders and gamers. But many suspected these solutions were only half-truths. If Rolapp was employed by the Tour for his acumen as a dealmaker and visionary, he had to have some conception of how the deal labored out for him. He might have believed in the Tour’s power and admired its leaders, but on a deeper stage, he had to believe a job at the Tour could be higher than a job at the NFL.

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In a latest panel with The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, Rolapp supplied a glimpse into his personal calculus behind his arrival — a determination that he said came back to a easy rationalization: History.

According to Rolapp, historical past instructed him that if you were a sports activities govt hoping to make a lasting mark, you should discover the locations in disaster. And why? Because every great period of prosperity and alternative in skilled sports activities originated first with a period of chaos.

“Where most people saw chaos, I saw the AFL-NFL in the 60s,” Rolapp instructed Marchand. “I saw a CBA crisis for baseball that reset the sport.” 

The most apparent instance for Rolapp was the one that hit closest to home: The AFL-NFL rivalry of the early Sixties. After all, in the early 60s, future Kansas City Chiefs proprietor Lamar Hunt helped spearhead soccer’s own LIV second — becoming a member of a collection of insurgent homeowners to type a new league to compete with the NFL.

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The NFL-AFL disaster did not have international funding, but it did have a highly effective and savvy group of homeowners succesful of placing a actual scare into the institution. Among the AFL’s earliest and most notable successes was a multi-year rights settlement with ABC — a TV deal that gave the league actual money and actual energy to signal away collegiate gamers from the NFL, difficult the league’s years-long monopoly over the sport. Later, the upstarts used that money to start poaching new expertise, including New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath.

Ultimately, the league realized it had more to gain from a decision than from continued battle. In 1966, Lamar Hunt convened an pressing assembly at Dallas Love Field Airport to agree to a truce. (The AFL grew to become what we now know as the AFC, the NFL grew to become the NFC; and the two conferences oriented their season around a championship sport between the best staff from each, which Hunt would later title the “Super Bowl.”)

That truce created the trendy NFL as we know it, but the battle between the AFL and NFL may have been more influential. After all, it was the risk of being usurped by a new competitor that led the NFL to broadly develop its quantity of franchises, recalibrate its strategy to TV as a moneymaking engine and create the season-ending championship format that even informal sports activities followers now take into account a national vacation. If not for the very actual upheaval brought about by the insurgent league, the NFL might not have reached the structural change that paved the manner for the league’s present golden age.

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Back in 2025, Rolapp saw the PGA Tour going through a related second of transformation. Like the AFL and NFL, the Tour had an entrenched hierarchy, a threatening competitor and an institution all of the sudden craving for substantial change.

As Rolapp defined to Marchand, this was the actual draw of the PGA Tour job: He could form a brand-new future for an whole sport.

“The Tour is having their crisis; it’s just later than everybody else had their crisis,” Rolapp said. “That, to me, is an opportunity.”

As it turned out, Rolapp’s “opportunity” thesis was spot-on. In just his first yr with the Tour, he spearheaded some of the largest adjustments in professional golf in a long time — adjustments that stratified the sport between the “Championship” and “Challenger” collection, ended the long-running follow of sponsor exemptions, and, yes, launched a brand-new championship format in the hopes of capturing informal golf followers.

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Interestingly, Rolapp does not see the change ending here. Unlike the NFL in the 60s and 70s, the runway to discover long-term stability is short. The NFL, NBA and faculty soccer have totally shaped companies with growing TV rights portfolios accountable for tens of billions from networks and streamers each yr. In this setting, golf has a smaller margin for error — it not only has to get issues “right” shortly, but it also has to keep getting issues proper to proceed incomes big-money contracts from more and more profit-stressed TV companions.

In his interview with Marchand, Rolapp hinted that this business could be on the brink of further change — with networks and streamers bidding for smaller broadcast packages. (While at the NFL, Rolapp labored on a broadcast bundle with Netflix that sees the streamer show only a handful of video games per yr.)

“I just think that Netflix knows what they want, they have been pretty clear that they want big events, they want them to be global, that’s what they’re leaning into,” Rolapp said. “That’s a lot different than saying ‘give me 25 weeks of programming’ like the regional sports network used to have. I think you ultimately need to think about: What problem are you solving for your broadcaster?”

This would mark yet another monumental change to professional golf, which has traditionally shared TV rights with only a small handful of full-time companions. It should not shock you to be taught it would also be something else — a historic echo.

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After all, one of the largest adjustments in NFL financial historical past came after the league made the shocking determination to present a sliver of its broadcast rights to a new associate — ABC — for the launch of a new broadcast, Monday Night Football. At the time, the deal appeared like a suicide mission, placing soccer on primetime when typical tv knowledge said it would fail against more conventional community primetime choices. Instead, the settlement was a hit — and MNF grew to become one of the longest-running (and most profitable) franchises in skilled sports activities.

“A lot of people said it wasn’t going to work, and they wanted to burn [NFL commissioner] Pete Rozelle on a stick,” Rolapp said. “Now it’s commonplace. I think sports has to think that way. I think you have to think about what your partners want.”

In the finish, if you’d like to know why Brian Rolapp left a comfortable job at the NFL for a PGA Tour in the midst of a generational disaster, this is the best reply. In golf, Rolapp saw something others did not: an alternative to think like his counterparts — and enact generational change in the course of.

He saw it because he saw historical past … and because he knew higher than most that historical past does not just rhyme; it repeats.

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