PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — As the PGA Tour shows signs of mounting another campaign to make its signature event a fifth major, one of its biggest stars does not believe the Players Championship needs any such boost.

“(The Players Championship) is an amazing tournament in its own right, and I don’t think it being classified a major or not a major makes it any more or any less,” Rory McIlroy said Tuesday, two days before the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am gets underway.

It is a quirk of golf that the top men’s professional golf league does not actually control any of the sport’s major events: the Masters (Augusta National Golf Club), U.S. Open (USGA), Open Championship (R&A), PGA Championship (PGA of America) and Ryder Cup (PGA of America/DP World Tour) are all run by separate entities.

That has led the PGA Tour to intermittently push for the Players to become a fifth major, or replace one of the existing four majors, most likely the PGA Championship. It appears that new CEO Brian Rolapp is bringing back the conversation ahead of next month’s Players, with a promotional campaign that began last week. “March is going to be major” was the tagline.

March is going to be … pic.twitter.com/Gd0NDgAMgK

— THE PLAYERS (@THEPLAYERS) February 5, 2026

The Players often features the strongest field in golf by Official World Golf Ranking, thanks to the Masters’ inviting past champions, the PGA’s offering spots to club professionals, or the two Opens’ providing a chance for dreamers. And TPC Sawgrass, one of the best golf courses in the United States, has been consistently renovated to provide a stern test for today’s golfers and their equipment advantage. It also features one of the most distinctive golf holes — the island green 17th.

“It’s the Players. Like it doesn’t need to be anything else,” McIlroy said. “Like I would say it’s got more of an identity than the PGA Championship does at the minute.”

But it’s also a PGA Tour event, which means no LIV Golf players.

And that’s the biggest nonstarter to the argument, even if you acknowledge that in golf’s history, the four majors have been a fluid concept. At different times, the Amateur Championship and U.S. Amateur were considered top-tier events, and the term “major” itself was not widely used until the 1960s. Arnold Palmer is often considered to be a driving force behind the idea that winning these four weeks a year means more than every other week.

“I’m a traditionalist, I’m a historian of the game. We have four major championships. You know, if you want to see what five major championships looks like, look at the women’s game. I don’t know how well that’s went for them,” McIlroy said.

McIlroy did say he thinks the PGA should move back to August and deliver on the “glory’s last shot” promise it held then. Since 2019, it’s been in May, which has limited which golf courses it can go to (weather concerns restrict the use of courses in the Midwest or North) and stuffed it between the Masters and U.S. Open.

McIlroy, the defending Players champion, quipped he’d love to be a seven-time major winner instead of five. But it hints at another complication — retroactively awarding that status to a tournament that has existed since 1974 and been held at TPC Sawgrass since 1982.

Would Tiger Woods now be a 17-time major winner? But adding a pair of trophies to his pile actually puts him further away from Jack Nicklaus, who won the Players three times in its first five years.

It’s messy, and not the sort of thing the PGA Tour can just make happen through sheer force of will, though Rolapp, with his decades of NFL experience, is no doubt aware of how a league can use its weight to make events bigger and more impactful.

McIlroy is making his 2026 PGA Tour debut this week at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, a tournament he won a year ago for the first time.