Dan Wetzel has done it again. Just days after his predictably slanted Masters column declaring the PGA Tour the undisputed victor over LIV Golf, the ESPN scribe doubled down with another hit piece titled “LIV Golf is still going, but its days seem numbered and probably always were.”

Published on Thursday, the article portrays the Saudi-backed league as a doomed “pipe dream,” an “epic money grab” fueled by a temporary “gravy train” of PIF cash that was always destined to fail.

Wetzel claims there “doesn’t appear to be much life left in LIV,” predicting its inevitable collapse while sneering at its format, team concept, and overall relevance.

This isn’t journalism — it’s a coordinated smear campaign from an outlet with deep financial ties to the PGA Tour. ESPN holds lucrative exclusive media rights with the PGA Tour, including live featured groups on ESPN+ and full event coverage.

ESPN also serves as the primary broadcast partner for TGL, the PGA Tour’s team-based indoor tech league where players smack balls into a giant video screen. These lucrative deals give ESPN every incentive to bury LIV and prop up its business partner.

Wetzel’s failure to disclose this blatant conflict of interest renders his “analysis” worthless.

The hypocrisy reaches new heights in Wetzel’s repeated dismissal of LIV’s team aspect as something the public has “largely ignored” or dismissed as gimmicky. In the most recent piece, he mocks it further, quoting Bubba Watson to claim almost no one knows the teams. Yet ESPN eagerly shoves TGL’s cringey region-based team names down viewers’ throats.

Take Rory McIlroy‘s Boston Commons. Of the four players who comprise the team, none were born or reside in Boston. In fact, three of the players aren’t even Americans, including Australia’s Adam Scott, Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama and Northern Ireland’s McIlroy. Keegan Bradley comes the closest — he’s a Boston sports fan from Vermont.

Let’s be real: if team golf is inherently dismissible, TGL should be laughed off as the pinnacle of gimmickry. Instead, ESPN promotes it relentlessly. The double standard is shameless: LIV’s traditional team element is ridiculed as irrelevant, while the PGA Tour’s cringey “tech-infused” version receives prime corporate backing and airtime.

Wetzel’s latest attack recycles the same tired tropes from his Masters column while ignoring inconvenient facts. He continues to sneer at LIV’s original 54-hole events, shotgun starts, and resort courses, seemingly oblivious to the fact that LIV Golf expanded to a full 72-hole individual stroke-play format for the entire 2026 season.

This significant evolution, implemented to enhance competitive credibility and major eligibility, receives zero mention. Declaring a league’s “days numbered” while refusing to acknowledge its most important recent adaptation isn’t oversight; it’s deliberate dishonesty.

Both pieces fixate on LIV’s limited, 10-player presence at the 2026 Masters as proof of terminal decline. Wetzel treats it as organic failure rather than the engineered outcome of years of OWGR manipulation. For years, the Official World Golf Ranking — controlled by golf’s gatekeepers (PGA Tour, DP World Tour, Augusta National, PGA, USGA, R&A) — awarded zero points to LIV tournaments.

Even after partial accreditation in February 2026, points are ludicrously restricted to only the top 10 finishers (and ties) per event, with 11th place counting the same as dead last.

This unprecedented cutoff, combined with historical suppression, has artificially tanked rankings for stars like Joaquin Niemann, whose advanced metrics place him among the world’s top 10-15 talents. His exclusion isn’t merit-based; it’s institutional gatekeeping.

Wetzel’s portrayal of the PGA Tour’s “Returning Member Program” as a confident masterstroke is particularly laughable in light of both columns. He frames it as players rushing back to superior competition. Reality: the program was a desperate, last-minute creation triggered by Brooks Koepka’s surprise reinstatement request.

Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, and Cam Smith — the real targets — all rejected it and stayed with LIV. Koepka returned, struggled, and sits roughly $3.5 million in the red after penalties, while undergoing what amounts to a humiliation ritual.

Meanwhile, Rahm and DeChambeau have each banked well over $10 million on LIV in 2026, with Rahm leading the money list.

Wetzel’s cherry-picking of results is especially dishonest. In his post-Masters column, he writes: “While LIV’s Tyrrell Hatton finished T3, big names such as Rahm (T38) and DeChambeau (missed cut) disappointed… Meanwhile, former-LIV/PGA returnees Patrick Reed and Koepka both finished T12.”

The ESPN writer posits their return to the PGA Tour somehow proves “better play.”

This is outright misleading. As a LIV player, Reed delivered a T3 in 2025, T12 in 2024, and T4 in 2023 at the Masters.

Koepka, as a PGA Tour player, missed the cut in both 2021 and 2022 at the Masters. In his first year with LIV (2023), he posted a T2 at Augusta National and then won the 2023 PGA Championship outright.

DeChambeau, with LIV since 2022, has recorded his two best Masters finishes (T6-2024, T5-2025), while his eight top-10 finishes in his 14 most recent majors, highlighted by a win at the 2024 U.S. Open, represent a career-best stretch in the majors — in fact: the best in major golf outside of Scottie Scheffler, McIlroy and Xander Schauffele.

To further expose Wetzel’s misleading narrative: as a PGA Tour member, DeChambeau made 19 career major starts and produced just two top 10s, including a win (2020 U.S. Open). As a LIV league member, he’s teed it up 14 times (five less) but has eight top-10s.

Finally, in the four 2025 majors, the oft-criticized Rahm had three top-15s, including two top-10s. In the same four majors, over the same 2025 major championship season, PGA Tour superstars Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, Cameron Young, and Collin Morikawa COMBINED for just one a top-10 finish.

Sure, Cameron Smith has struggled recently in the majors, but his record since joining LIV includes three top-10s and overall is no worse than many PGA Tour stars, such as the aforementioned Thomas (aka “JT” by the media), over the same time span (2023-26).

Like most in the golf media space, Wetzel ignores these damning facts to further the narrative of PGA Tour supremacy. By churning out back-to-back hit pieces, Wetzel isn’t informing golf fans, he’s running interference for his employer’s commercial interests.

Even as Wetzel was calling LIV an “oil-pipeline-funded pipe dream” that sold the Saudis “a bill of goods,” LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil was pushing back hard in an interview released on Thursday.

O’Neil declared the 2026 season is going “full throttle,” and building strong momentum. He directly questioned why critics like Wetzel are so determined to rid professional golf of LIV, asking pointedly: “How does the removal of LIV make golf better?”

Well, for one, ESPN would certainly benefit by having superstars like DeChambeau and Rahm in its featured groups on ESPN+’s LIVE broadcasts of the PGA Tour.