@GVOldTimer said:

Why should they continue to play in New England? Outside of Boston it's sparsely populated.

I'm not saying they should, just that they don't. I'm being empirical, not normative. I'm not passing judgment on the tour patterns, nor even what people say about them, but rather putting both in the light of actual data.

But it's not as sparse as other areas. For example, New England is twice as dense as Washington state (with 14 million vs 6 million, each in 71K square miles) - and Boston proper has fewer than 650K.