PAC meeting today could be fascinating

The PGA Tour’s Players Advisory Council, or PAC, is meeting today in Los Angeles just ahead of the Northern Trust Open. And it could be a very interesting meeting.

One of the topics sure to be addressed is the continuing talk of changing the qualification route for most players to the PGA Tour. Tour officials would like to basically eliminate the Q-school that allows raw rookies to reach the tour in favorite of a system that would have such players qualify for the Nationwide Tour first. Then Nationwide Tour players would face a series of tournaments late in the season with PGA Tour players who have failed to maintain their cards.Top players from that series of events would move on to the PGA Tour the following year.

Such a plan would boost the Nationwide Tour’s importance as a breeding ground for players, but would hurt the idea of the Cinderella story coming straight off a college campus or even a teenage foreign player earning his way onto the PGA Tour right away.

But there could be other topics addressed at the meeting. For instance, there is the 2013 schedule to be hammered out, and Commissioner Tim Finchem is supposed to meet with several officials from several tournaments looking for new dates to see what can be accomplished. One tour official told me at the Humana Challenge last month that he wouldn’t be surprised to see a radically different schedule for the 2013 season. What “radically” means is anyone’s guess, but some tournaments could seem some major changes in their dates.

And there is the topic is starting the FedEx Cup earlier. Instead of having the points start piling up at the start of the calendar year, the tour could see some Fall Series events as points event for the following year, as well as tour-sanctioned events in Malaysia and China in the fall. That could start in 2013, though it also seems to rub against the idea of a shorter season that players like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson have championed.

Watch for news on all of these fronts today, but particularly the revamped qualifying process.