The Farmers Insurance Open takes place this week. It is the fourth tournament of the year on the PGA Tour. Its most special feature, beyond playing the first two rounds on the two courses of the Torrey Pines municipal complex, North and South, is that since 2022 it starts on Wednesday and ends on Saturday. The reason is to avoid clashing with the NFL conference finals.
Beyond this logistical matter, the list of players participating in the tournament this week offers a reflection that goes a bit further. In San Diego, Hideki Matsuyama, as the best player in the world ranking, fourth place, and Ludvig Aberg, sixth position, will be present. They are the only two top 10 players at Torrey Pines. Additionally, from the top 20, we have Keegan Bradley, Number 13, Sahith Theegala, Number 15, and Sungjae Im, Number 20. How could Sungjae Im not be there…
To recap: two top 10 players worldwide, barely one of the top five, and four top 20. You have to go back a long way to find such weak numbers in this event, which remains one of the most historic on the PGA Tour. Its first edition was held in the early 1950s, and Tiger Woods has won it seven times.
To find worse participation numbers, you have to go back to 2013, more than ten years ago. In that edition, there were only two top 10 players worldwide and four top 20. The best in the tournament was Tiger Woods, then Number 2 in the world. It was precisely the last of his seven victories. It is easy to conclude that the Farmers is one of the events most affected by the new world order of golf, with the ongoing rift between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf. In fact, in the current top 20, there are two players who cannot even play due to the American circuit’s sanction: Tyrrell Hatton and Bryson DeChambeau.
Precisely, the division that has been created, with the real threat posed to the PGA Tour by the arrival of LIV Golf, led to the creation of designated tournaments on the American circuit, weeks with much higher prize funds to try to counter the huge amounts of money the Saudi league started paying and thus contain the exodus of stars. It was a way of saying: if you’re leaving for money, know that you can also earn a fortune here.
The problem for the Farmers is that it was always left out of the elevated tournament distribution. Either the AT&T Pebble Beach, played the week after Torrey Pines, or the Phoenix Open, played two weeks later, have been elevated. Thus, many top players choose to rest this week and play at Pebble Beach.
This is the main reason the tournament has declined significantly in recent years, beyond some purely circumstantial situations like Scottie Scheffler‘s hand problem, although he has never been fond of this tournament, or Xander Schauffele‘s unspecified medical absence, which also kept him out of the American Express and this Tuesday’s TGL. Schauffele was a regular at the Farmers. Additionally, players like Morikawa, Bhatia, or Nicolai Hojgaard have withdrawn at the last minute.
If we review the more recent history of the Farmers, the reality is that it was never an event that attracted all the best in the world. In fact, since 2013, only on four occasions has the tournament featured the participation of the Number One: Jon Rahm (2022), Justin Rose (2019), Jason Day (2017), and Tiger Woods (2014). It doesn’t seem like many. In any case, there is a significant difference between then and this year.
Top 10 and top 20 worldwide at the Farmers since 2013
2025: 2 and 4
2024: 3 and 8
2023: 5 and 9
2022: 6 and 12
2021: 3 and 10
2020: 5 and 8
2019: 5 and 12
2018: 4 and 8
2017: 3 and 7
2016: 5 and 6
2015: 3 and 9
2014: 3 and 6
2013: 2 and 4
