A team that thought it had punched its ticket to a Greyhawk regional event has been disqualified from the Barstool Classic after Fore Play Pod hosts caught them altering a signed scorecard, in a saga that the podcast's hosts call the worst rules violation they have ever processed at the long-running amateur tournament.
Fore Play Pod episode 857, dropped Thursday, is being widely shared in golf circles for its unusually direct opening. "They're cheaters. They should be banished from the Bar Stool Classic forever. Take their name off," co-host Riggs said, before he and Trent and Frankie spent the next half-hour walking through how the team was caught.
The mechanics matter, because the cheat was about the most blatant possible. Each Barstool Classic group plays as a random-pairs scramble, and once the round is finished both members and their playing partners are required to sign the scorecard. Final scores are then re-entered by the tournament team into the Golf Genius app, the official record. On the night of the qualifier, with seven under set as the cutline for advancement, a team that the podcasters had announced as "six under" suddenly appeared as seven-under qualifiers when the final list was published.
A member of the dropped team was the one who noticed the discrepancy and contacted the show. Their version, according to the Fore Play retelling, was that they had played at six under and were unsure how the seven-under figure had been recorded. The hosts pulled the relevant scorecard from the box.
"We look at the card and there's a five erased with a new four and a circle over it," Riggs said. "Now Yip fell to the floor when that happened. He literally fell to the floor because this is a literal dream for him. Our quick assumption is that after they had gotten the signatures, they had went to the card, erased the five, put a four in, and then submitted it. So that's like that's as illegal as it gets."
The "Yip" they refer to is Yip Strickler, who has carved out an unlikely Instagram following as a self-styled handicap detective and was working day one of the Classic as the show's Chief Handicap Counselor. Strickler had spent the morning leaving warning notes inside competitors' carts about score-posting irregularities. By that night he had a textbook case in his lap.
Riggs and Trent then phoned the player whose scorecard column had been altered. The admission, by their account, came almost instantly.
"He goes, 'Ah, you know what, I think we may have made a five.' Like he basically cut me off," Riggs said. "I don't think it was a four, dude. We're so sorry about that. They admitted to it right away. They said, 'Do whatever you have to do. Disqualify us obviously.'"
The man on the line told the hosts that his playing partner, who had handed in the scorecard after collecting all four required signatures, had already left for an outbound flight. "Dude, we made a five," he conceded. "I don't know what else to tell you. You're calling me with allegations. I'm admitting to it. Maybe my partner did something. I don't know."
Trent's verdict on the show captured the broader feeling about an erased signature. "Taking an eraser to the Constitution after they all signed it. Empires fall, you know? Like there's no truth in anything then."
Fore Play has not named the disqualified team publicly, but the podcast made clear they have been removed from the leaderboard and replaced by the next group at the cutline. The slot at Greyhawk now goes to a team that finished a stroke clear without altering a number after the fact.
The episode also highlighted Strickler's broader role as the tournament's score-integrity guard, including the case of two former competitors who carried different handicap indexes in different states and used the higher number when entering the Classic. Both were ejected after Strickler's investigators called their home-club committees.
For all the cart-mounted antics and hooting and hollering that define the Barstool Classic each year, the Fore Play hosts struck a serious tone on the way out. "The reason we get every signature is that there is only so much you can do to protect against cheating," Riggs said. "If people really want to cheat, they can. But going back and changing a signed card while live scoring is public is just as brutal a cheating as it can get."
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*Originally published on [Golf News Global](https://golfnews.global/article/barstool-classic-cheating-scandal-scorecard-erased-fore-play-pod-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
