A year ago, when Brian Rolapp inherited the top seat at the PGA Tour, he already had a vision for the circuit. While he may have wanted (and even asked for) a few months to learn everyone’s name and the structures of the Tour, sharing that vision was a major part of his interview process to earn the job in the first place. Now, almost exactly one year after Rolapp’s stewardship began, the future of the Tour has officially arrived, too.
Thanks to a near-unanimous vote Monday from the PGA Tour Enterprises Board, the Tour, beginning in 2028, will witness the biggest shift in its competitive structure in decades. Some of the plan reflects the vision of Rolapp, a savvy executive focused on selling television rights. Other parts reflect the influence of Strategic Sports Group, which owns 14 percent of the Tour via a $1.5 billion investment. And lastly, no small portion of it reflects the interest and collaboration of the Tour’s membership, led by its seven player directors. Tiger Woods is one of them, and while he has taken time away from golf for treatment in recent months, he was in attendance for the vote Monday and is at TPC River Highlands Tuesday.
In a way, the structural changes are akin to a top-to-bottom house renovation — the address hasn’t changed and the front door still may be in the same place, but everything on the inside has a new look and feel, all with the purpose of taking the strongest, most valuable golf tour on the planet … and making it stronger and more valuable. Formal television rights negotiations are not far off, and Rolapp reminded the membership in an email Tuesday morning. The FCC met with current rights holders as well as potential new partners, gauging what could compel networks into paying more money than ever.
The Tour will operate via two different tracks: the Championship Series, with roughly 130 players, and Challenger Series, with more players. Separating them will be the strictest form of promotion and relegation the sport has ever seen. The top tier (Championship) will have the top players, top billing and top-tier money, in the form of $20 million purses (or more). The schedule will be trimmed down for both tracks, but both schedules will guarantee player access. No more graduating to the PGA Tour and being held out of its biggest purses. But … “Championship” players who don’t play well for a full season will lose their access to top-tier events for a full season at a time. They will play for less money on the Challenger Series, but greater purses than the current step down, the Korn Ferry Tour. Sponsor exemptions, which have been the lifeline of popular players who have run out of form, will be eliminated.
These changes, which didn’t get across the finish line easily, represent the truest meritocracy yet for the Tour, meaning this week is perhaps the most significant week in the Tour’s history since August 1968, when it was founded.
ONE OF ROLAPP’S FIRST MOVES as CEO came last August when he created the Future Competition Committee, a nine-person panel whose purpose is right there in its name: redefining the Tour’s future competitive structures. Unsurprisingly, the committee was chaired by Tiger Woods and is heavily player-focused. But Rolapp added a curious name to the group: Theo Epstein, the longtime baseball executive who works closely with some in the investor group.
Epstein has a pedigree for not just turning around baseball franchises but also for ushering in significant changes to the entire MLB experience. Pitch-clocks, extra-innings rules, shift standards, etc., were incorporated over time and have led to a renaissance for America’s pastime during an era where audiences have no time. He also has taken up great interest in golf and served as an important voice reminding the Tour’s player directors where change, even in surprising areas, can be great.
In an impassioned, final argument sent to the Tour’s boards over the weekend, Epstein invoked those baseball fixes and suggested the changes they’d be voting on offered the Tour “far greater opportunity and upside” than even MLB’s raucous success. He outlined many of the ideas the FCC kicked around, designed to create “consequence and jeopardy.”
Getting there involved hundreds of model iterations. No idea was off the table. Should the Tour force playoffs each week to define a podium, like the Olympics, whenever there’s, say, a four-way tie for second or a six-way tie for third? Should the Tour have various “swings” where players get promoted and relegated frequently mid-season? Forget 72-man “Signature Events” — should the Tour just be 72 players, period? All three ideas were seriously considered.
But Epstein’s letter reminded the player directors how their expertise and interest helped guide the FCC in specific ways. Limited-field, Signature Event-style tournaments were not big enough; they needed larger fields with wider access to those fields. The idea of promotion and relegation isn’t foreign to this group, but it couldn’t happen mid-season. Even the best players have good weeks followed by missed cuts — promotion and relegation had to happen via a much bigger sample size.
Epstein wrote about how increased “popularity, cultural relevance, and associated revenues,” like what he witnessed with MLB, were on offer with this new model, and on Monday the board voted in near-unanimous approval of it. Patrick Cantlay, an eight-time Tour winner, elected to abstain. In a matter of hours, promotion vehicles were shifted into place for Rolapp’s Tuesday-morning press conference at the Travelers Championship. After listening to players, partners and fans, Rolapp said, “This new model is our response.”
The Details
– Over the course of 21(ish) stroke-play events — with 36-hole cuts and roughly 120 players — a new points system will determine the best golfer in the world that season. There will be no need for a subjective Player of the Year award like the Tour currently has, based on votes from Tour members. No. 1 will be obvious.
– That series of events will also determine which 90 players are retained for the following season and which will be relegated, creating a late-season intensity for those on the bubble.
– Following the stroke-play portion of the season, the Tour’s postseason will introduce match play for the first time, the closest alignment with how other sports winnow down from eight teams to four to two and, finally, one. It will be designed with a TV audience in mind and likely contested across two weekends, ending at a “prestigious” course at which the Tour wouldn’t be able to stage a full-field event.
– The season-long schedule will incorporate off-week breaks, designed to inspire top pros to play two or three weeks straight before a reset. During Championship off-weeks, the Challenger Series is expected to take centre stage, with 144-player fields and greater points on offer to increase significance. Win two Challenger Series events and you’ll gain automatic promotion to the Championship.
– After a season of 20 Challenger Series events — where purses will be around $4 million — at least 20 Challenger players will be promoted to the Championship Series, where purses are $20 million or more. That is the rub of what’s at stake. One series has mega-millions on offer; the other is all about getting to those mega-millions.
– Because this requires turning over from one system to the future regime, eligibility criteria for the 2028 Championship Series will be determined prior to the start of the 2027 PGA Tour season, so players know what they’re playing for and fans know what they’re cheering for.
– To maintain consistency, players in each series are restricted from competing in the other series. There is no alternate list for Championship events. If 30 players on the top flight elect to not play the Genesis Invitational, it will be a smaller field that week. The main reason for this is to underline exactly who is a Championship Series player each year and who isn’t (yet). The Tour backed itself into a corner in recent years by limiting field sizes and telling graduates from the Korn Ferry Tour and DP World Tour that they didn’t have a place in the top fields. That concern has been nullified.
– Speaking of the DP World Tour, the Strategic Alliance between it and the PGA Tour remains, and players from the Europe-based tour will have qualifying spots held for them in the Championship Series. The same goes for PGA Tour University. How many spots remains to be seen.
FOR NOW, LET THAT LAST LINE SERVE as an important indication: plenty still remains to be resolved.
It’s a phrase that no doubt will make fans roll their eyes. All that pro-golf fans have known for the last five years is half-baked plans and promises about what could be coming. Hopes for 2025 were pushed off to 2026, which were pushed off to 2027, and now we have solid plans for 2028. But if there’s any crucial reason for all that, it’s because the structure of the Tour is deeply complicated. And it has been changing every few years for decades and decades, morphing into a warped Rubik’s Cube with more than six sides. How the Tour handles career exemptions, for example, is still getting straightened out. How it will handle player injuries remains to be seen. The guarantee of winner’s exemptions won’t be what it used to be, but that guarantee is still being defined. The format of postseason match play isn’t fully cooked, but it’s probably 85% well done.
Included in the Tour’s Tuesday-morning press release is mention of a “Last Chance” series, where four to six fall events are grouped together to award a small number of competitors a last chance at joining the Championship Series.
The Challenger Series represents a fascinating Rorschach test for all involved, fans included. As time passes, it will boast surprising names who were relegated from the PGA Tour, in much the same way the second-flight of English Football will have West Ham United playing among lesser clubs in 2026-27. To West Ham faithful, that’s a tough reality to deal with. But the bottom line here? West Ham had a horrible season and earned its demise. The club now will have to claw its way back to the Premiership.
If the current PGA Tour season ended today, Taylor Pendrith, Marco Penge, Denny McCarthy, Rasmus Hojgaard, Mackenzie Hughes, Joel Dahmen and a number of other notable names would be outside the top 90 and facing relegation to the Challenger Series. Ask any of them and they’ll probably tell you it hasn’t been a great year of golf.
The main point is that, in this future-leaning hypothetical, those pros will have had their full chance. They’ll have had the full slate of starts in $20 million events to prove if they belong in the Championship Series. On Day 1 of event 1 of that future PGA Tour schedule, all 120 to 130 players will have the same opportunity as Scottie Scheffler, and nothing in their way but some of the best championship golf courses in the world. Some will call that tantalising; others will call it cutthroat. For each, that is exactly the point.
This article originated on Golf.com
Leave a comment