For the last several years, Pebble Beach week has been frustrating. It is an amazing venue with the best views anywhere on the PGA Tour, and yet the tournament itself continued to lose its luster. Players eschewed lengthy rounds with amateur partners for other events throughout the year, and arguably the greatest golf course on the PGA Tour schedule rarely had a field to match its significance.
Here’s a look at Pebble’s Official World Golf Ranking field rating rank on the PGA Tour over the last five years. A field rating is, according to the OWGR, more or less the strength of field of a given tournament. These numbers exclude major championships but include all other PGA Tour events.
- 2023: 26th
- 2022: 34th
- 2021: 37th
- 2020: 26th
- 2019: 27th
- 2018: 18th
This is … kind of pathetic, honestly. That sounds harsh, but if you’re going to have one of the great American golf venues on your rotation, it deserves to have one of the great tournament fields of the year. Pebble Beach has not had that. It has not even been close to having that.
It has ranked, at times, behind tournaments like the Safeway Open, Honda Classic, Sanderson Farms Championship and 3M Open. All fine and good tournaments, but not locales like Monterey nor venues like Pebble Beach.
There are reasons for this, and they extend beyond the fact that professional golfers are disinterested in four days of a pro-am event at a place like Pebble Beach. The Saudi International began in 2019, and it began luring players with appearance fees to the point that the PGA Tour had to put a rule in place that stipulated golfers would return the favor by playing the Pebble at some point in the near future.
Obviously, 2020 was a wonky year. And then there is the rest of the West Coast swing. The Tour has done such a good job with places like Riviera and Phoenix that it became difficult to choose which of the January-February events to play (you can’t play them all). Pebble and its six-plus-hour rounds (perhaps obviously) lost out.
All of that has changed. The Tour, AT&T and Pebble Beach have worked to make this tournament one of the signature events of 2024. It has replaced the WM Phoenix Open, which was an elevated event last year. And while I disagree about Phoenix’s relegation to a non-signature event, I’m certainly glad that Pebble is getting the field worthy of its promotion.
It will take a while to shake out, but its field rating of 350 would have ranked it 10th on last year’s PGA Tour schedule and could put it even higher this year given that some of last year’s field ratings will be a bit deflated this year because tournaments that ranked near the top — like the Travelers Championship and RBC Heritage — will have smaller, no-cut fields (like Pebble) which brings the field rating down.
Regardless, Pebble is going to be great this year. Of the current top 15 players in the Official World Golf Rankings, 12 did not play last year. All 12 are in this year’s field. The only player in the top 15 who is not playing Pebble is Jon Rahm, who was recently signed by LIV Golf and will play in Mayakoba this week in their first event of the season.
Throw in recent Tour winner and amateur-turned-professional Nick Dunlap, as well as Ryder Cuppers Ludvig Aberg, Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler and other stars like Tony Finau and Jason Day, and this golf tournament finally has a field worthy of its golf course.
There is only one course the Tour goes to regularly that has hosted as many big events as Pebble Beach. Six U.S. Opens (and a seventh in a few years), five U.S. Amateurs, a PGA Championship, a U.S. Women’s Open. Pebble is a big-time golf venue, but it always felt minute during the PGA Tour schedule. There was some sadness and strangeness in that. It has recently felt like a bummer that Pebble week has been so low in the pecking order of great PGA Tour tournaments.
That’s changing this year, which is a good thing for Pebble but an even better thing for the PGA Tour.