Brooks Koepka commands the spotlight following Monday's announcement that the PGA Tour has extended immunity to LIV Golf's marquee players. But the tour's decision reverberates far beyond the five-time major champion, reshaping competitive hierarchies, sponsor relationships, and the sport's political landscape. Here are the winners and losers of the tour's one-time free pass:

Winner: Brian Rolapp

The CEO position was created, in part, to concentrate power that had been diffused across the previous commissioner's tenure. There's advantage, too, in arriving as reinforcement to the LIV battle rather than as its shell-shocked defender, a luxury Jay Monahan never enjoyed. Yet in less than six months, Rolapp has delivered the most devastating blow since the schism began, one that may prove terminal for his opposition.

The PGA Tour, long before LIV's arrival, was notorious for reactive governance and institutional timidity. Rolapp is dismantling that reputation. While he honors the weight of everything that's transpired since 2022, a consciousness he's instilled throughout his leadership team, his philosophy refuses to be stuck by precedent. That he engineered precisely what the tour needed without alienating the constituency he serves (more on this shortly) required threading an impossibly narrow passage. The early returns suggest he navigated it flawlessly.

For skeptics who questioned importing an outsider into golf's insular world, Rolapp is delivering an emphatic rebuttal.

Loser: Scott O'Neil

O'Neil marks his one-year anniversary as LIV CEO this week. His signature achievement to date remains elusive. Marginalized during PGA Tour-PIF negotiations, presiding over a league hemorrhaging capital at historic rates, he's now surrendered one of only three prime-generation superstars without securing reinforcement. The FOX-U.S. broadcast agreement materialized on his watch, yes—but that deal owes more to the network's courtship of Saudi favor ahead of its 2034 Men's World Cup television rights bid than to O'Neil's dealmaking prowess. It's only been a year, so there is still a chance to right the ship, but it has not been a stellar debut.

Winner: Bryson DeChambeau

Patrick McDermott

DeChambeau's 2022 departure represented something close to exile. His game had deteriorated into injury mechanical confusion, his relationships with tour officials and peers poisoned by backstage maneuvering and his prominent role in antitrust litigation. Now? DeChambeau ranks among golf's most popular figures, a transformation born from maturation and the unexpected brotherhood he discovered with LIV teammates. He needed to leave to locate the person he'd lost in the machinery, and in doing so found himself.

He is the authority over an entire competitive order's survival. His return to the tour would end the civil war outright, rendering LIV functionally extinct. This grants DeChambeau leverage: he'll either emerge as golf's unifier, achieving rehabilitation that seemed fantastical three years ago, or command a contract so big it becomes the league's final monument to desperation. Either path is vindication for a man the sport had written off.

Losers: Joaquin Niemann and Tyrrell Hatton Beyond DeChambeau and Jon Rahm, these two have shouldered LIV's competitive legitimacy across the past two seasons. Crucially, they've refused to hide within the league's protected environment, pursuing competition in strong fields in Europe, Asia and Australia. Which makes their exclusion from the immunity offer harsh.

Their major showings haven't helped. This is especially true of Niemann, a player who has complained about LIV’s lack of World Ranking points yet has posted a lone top-10 finish in 26 major starts. Worse, as noted in the tour’s statement, future major success does not mean the same offer will be made going forward. They exist in competitive limbo; too decorated to ignore, too scarred by major championship failure to save.

Winners: PGA Tour rank-and-file

Among the obstacles in PGA Tour-PIF negotiations was reintegrating LIV defectors. They were players who'd surrendered their tour memberships and, in many cases, would have lost playing privileges had they remained. The math for tour officials was hard to calculate: how do you redistribute opportunities away from members who rejected guaranteed fortunes to maintain loyalty?

The exemption structure has mostly neutralized that tension. In conversations with tour players over the past 24 hours, resistance to Koepka's return is minimal. The exemption's foundation in majors sidesteps the zero-sum competition for field positions that would have ignited a membership revolt. Moreover, Koepka and his LIV colleagues aren't displacing anyone, as they will be added to fields without taking any earned spots away.

The financial penalties complete the political equation. LIV players banked generational wealth, but their reentry carries a price tag substantial enough to mute complaints about having it both ways. The rank-and-file aren't losing opportunities or subsidizing their former colleagues' return.

Loser: Phil Mickelson

You don’t have to look too far on social media to find schadenfreude. Because the major exemption applies only to victories earned during the LIV era, Mickelson's 2021 PGA Championship counts for nothing. But the real punishment is deeper. Should DeChambeau and Rahm depart, Mickelson's final competitive years will unfold on a stage populated by journeymen and curiosities, playing for teams that have cycled through so many rebrandings their identities have dissolved into meaninglessness. This is the inheritance of his actions. The scorched-earth interviews, the Saudi entanglement he championed, the bridge-burning of his former tour. He earned this exile through his own miscalculations.

Patrick Smith

Yet watching one of golf's 20 greatest players descend into irrelevance is sad. Not the kind that generates sympathy, perhaps, but the kind that makes you look away.

Winner: Full-field events

There is a likelihood that a significant portion of the tour's event portfolio will find itself demoted, defunded, or effectively eliminated under the impending schedule restructure. This has triggered a backstage scramble among tournament directors fighting for institutional survival. For the non-signature events, Koepka's return represents an unexpected gift. His presence, alongside potential additions like DeChambeau and Rahm, transforms their near-term product from afterthought to legitimate draw. Throw in sponsors and corporate interests who were sweating television ratings, who could possess ammunition for renewal negotiations.

It's a temporary reprieve, not a structural solution. But in professional golf's current state of flux, where hierarchies are being reordered, even short-term relevance constitutes something. Loser: LIV Golf

Since its incendiary 2022 launch, LIV has extracted exactly one prime-generation star in Rahm and no reinforcements are (likely) coming. The league's most celebrated acquisitions have been social media personalities. LIV also surrendered its 54-hole format, the innovation it claimed would revolutionize golf, in a desperate pursuit of World Ranking recognition that remains elusive and becomes more distant with Koepka's departure. It wants to be the international circuit while staging the majority of its events in an American market that has demonstrably rejected it. Television ratings remain nonexistent.

Worse, LIV’s geopolitical calculation may have already extracted maximum value. The league arguably fulfilled its function as soft-power diplomacy, strengthening Saudi Arabia's relationship with Donald Trump and securing tangible White House access through its partnerhsip. Mission accomplished, which raises the question: why continue incinerating capital on a failing product that just became worse?

If DeChambeau or Rahm follows Koepka through the exit, LIV doesn't just lose the pretense of viability. It would be reduced to what its harshest critics always claimed it was, a vanity project that burned billions to achieve cultural irrelevance.

Winner or Loser: Jon Rahm

When Rahm defected to LIV in December 2023, he was the man in golf. His four-win season had delivered a second major championship that begged the question of how far this guy could go. What has happened since makes that moment seem very far away.

His persona, based in part on his expressed devotion to golf's traditions, now exists in odds with the Saudi government and everything they’ve been accused of doing. More damaging still was the broken promise: his repeated insistence that he would never abandon the PGA Tour, revealed as either self-deception or misdirection when he did just that. His competitive standing has suffered, a Sunday charge at Quail Hollow his lone major moment in the past two years.

Manuel Velasquez

He faces a redemption of sorts. Return to the PGA Tour, and he secures his Ryder Cup legacy, ends the sport's existential civil war, and reclaims the narrative he paused. Golf's traditional powers will forgive him because they need what his return represents. Or he can remain with LIV, choosing the money he claimed never motivated him.

For those who believed they understood Rahm, and believed he understood himself, the coming decision will provide clarity that's been absent since December 2023. He'll finally answer the question his defection created: who is Jon Rahm when forced to choose between the person he said he was and the fortune that proved he wasn't?