Rory McIlroy: NFL’s Year-Round Tease Offers Blueprint for Golf’s Future

PEBBLE BEACH—Two days after Super Bowl LX dazzled a football-mad nation 83 miles south in Santa Clara, Rory McIlroy settled behind a microphone on the Monterey Peninsula and dissected America’s sporting obsession with the same precision he once reserved for Augusta National.

The reigning Masters champion and world No. 2, preparing to defend his AT&T Pro-Am title, was asked how a boy from Holywood, Northern Ireland—where soccer, rugby and golf dominate—makes sense of the NFL’s omnipresence.

“I’ve tried really hard with football,” McIlroy said, grinning. “Really hard. I appreciated the Super Bowl for the defensive chess match, especially the Seahawks. I could watch five days of cricket and be mesmerized. I just didn’t grow up with it.”

Then the four-time major winner pivoted to a comparison that could reshape professional golf. With the PGA Tour re-engineering its calendar after LIV Golf’s incursions, McIlroy argued the league should borrow the NFL’s scarcity model.

“It’s a short season and then, once it goes away, people miss it,” he explained. “From a marketing perspective it’s genius, right? They drip-feed things—the combine, the draft, preseason. The season is short but they drip-feed just enough to keep you interested the whole way through the year. As we contemplate going to more of that scarcity model, there’s a lot to be learned from the NFL.”

McIlroy will test his own year-round focus Thursday when he opens his 2026 PGA Tour campaign at Pebble Beach, where last February’s victory ignited a career-defining run: a win at the Players Championship and, finally, a green jacket at Augusta National that completed the career Grand Slam.

The high didn’t last. McIlroy finished outside the top 10 in three of the season’s final three majors, leaving him firmly at No. 2 in the world behind Scottie Scheffler. Scheffler’s six-win barrage—including the PGA and British Open—has produced a rankings chasm: 17.0 points to McIlroy’s 8.4.

“He’s relentless,” McIlroy said of Scheffler, who extended a streak of 17 consecutive top-10s with a closing 64 at the Phoenix Open. “Anyone who wants to catch Scottie will have to bring that sort of game week-in, week-out. He’s really the first one since Tiger to be doing this.”

McIlroy did solve Scheffler twice in 2025—at the Masters and again in September’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, where Europe’s road victory felt like a street fight against 50,000 New Yorkers. The triumph carried extra resonance for a player reared on continental team glory rather than Super Bowl parties.

On Thursday he’ll try to channel that momentum into another Pebble Beach triumph—and, perhaps, into a golf schedule that drips intrigue the way the NFL does.