Yes yes yes. If major devs like EA wouldn't hide behind the cloak of "licensed" teams/players/leagues/competitions/etc perhaps we'd still have College football & basketball games on the market today.
There's absolutely no reason whatsoever that in the year 2015 we shouldn't have a bare bones game engine, with the tools/architecture in place to full customize all of the "licensed" aspects of a sports game. This goes across all sports. Golf lends really well to this design philosophy since it would be unrealistic to expect a dev to create the vast amounts of real life courses, but when you task the user base with this you end up with a truly marvelous product that has a bond with the community and isn't missing key elements because of licensing issues.
Konami's PES is the only "major" game that incorporates elements of user customizability via OPTION FILES, although it is lacking in depth. I'd rather see the money saved on paying for licensing and pour that into the core gameplay engines.