PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — On Wednesday morning, the still-green CEO of the PGA Tour, Brian Rolapp, laid out six “themes” for where the Tour is headed. He did it in a room surrounded by roughly 1,100 people, many of them on the Tour payroll, but many others on the payroll of players, golf media, major corporations, etc.
These themes, and countless others, have been bandied about across dozens of meetings over the last six months. Many of those meetings involved Tiger Woods and the Future Competition Committee, the PGA Tour’s newest investors at Strategic Sports Group, and a handful of board members whose job it is to delineate the future.
Rolapp’s press conference may have been short on concrete specifics, but that’s because the minutia is still getting hammered out. In theory at least, it amounted to an important (if vague) line in the sand, telling the world what to expect. I’m here to tell you a bit more about what the details actually mean.
Theme No. 1: A trimmed down schedule
The future PGA Tour schedule will have somewhere between 21 and 26 events from late January into September. (Overall, it would like to avoid September if possible, and would only be pulled in that direction by the traditional dates of the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup.) Twenty-one to 26 is roughly 12 to 15 fewer events than the Tour has now.
Why is fewer better? What sports league is contracting its schedule?
The answer is about creating scarcity of events and trying to pack more into those events. In modern PGA Tour terms, that means more guarantees that 100 of the Tour’s top 100 show up on the weeks you tell them to show up. The Tour will not be able to do that across the board, but it should try as hard as it can to do so. That is how you create a predictable, sellable product to the TV market.
The reason Rolapp is saying “21 to 26” is because it’s not fully finalized yet. The schedule will absolutely include the four majors, the players, the playoff events and the year-end team competition. But a sternly commercial mindset may call for 21. A players-focused approach probably leans toward the flexibility of 26. That’ll get haggled out over the next few months. But here’s the bottom line:
With $20 million (or more!) purses in all of these events, pros on this Tour will be thriving financially.
Theme No. 2: 120-player events, WITH cuts
One hundred and twenty. That’s the size of the fields on this future Tour, which should be considered a major win for players who haven’t been playing Signature Events in recent years. Those who have finished 51 through 100 in the FedEx haven’t been able to crack the biggest events. Now they will, which should offer plenty of ease to their schedule-building efforts.
But just because the fields will be bigger doesn’t mean it’ll be a cakewalk, because all those events are bound to have 36-hole cuts. A long-term staple of pro golf at the highest level is players slamming their trunks on Friday evening and leaving the grounds because their play hasn’t been to standard. That helps make Friday interesting again, which should feel like a win to broadcasters.
Theme No. 3. A splashy start out WEST
Future seasons are going to officially start in late January and will kick off somewhere on the west coast. You might be thinking, Isn’t that already the case?
Yes, but the Tour has realized an exit plan from Hawaii, a lovely island where it costs a great deal of money to host a tournament. Instead, the Tour is more likely to kick off in San Diego at Torrey Pines — aligning with the week before the Super Bowl — or at the WM Phoenix Open, which is often played the week of the Super Bowl.
It’s plausible that the legendary track Pebble Beach becomes the Tour’s punchy start-line, but each week that passes brings better chance of sunny skies in Monterey. It may be better off third in line. More than anything, the Tour’s start will be in primetime, once again appealing to broadcasters.
Theme No. 4: A return to major metros
Rolapp rattled off a number of major cities during his press conference Wednesday: Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, D.C.
All cities the Tour does not visit annually. That’s about to change. It doesn’t mean the smaller communities that host Tour events right now will be forgotten. It just means the biggest events will end up going to some of the biggest markets in the country.
More people means more ticket revenue which offers a greater setting to improve the moments that define Tour history. Optically, that matters to the Tour’s marketability much more than its history of bringing a few recognizable players to Silvis, Ill.
Memphis and Maryland are unlikely to host playoff events like they did last year. Chicago and New York? Much more likely.
Theme No 5: Promotion and relegation
This is the compelling juice of the Tour’s future. It will take on a cleaner, more rigid shape of two levels with two different schedules. Rolapp used the word “tracks” but “tiers” suffices as well. The top tier will play those 21 to 26 events referenced above. The next tier will play out its season in pursuit of gaining promotion to that top level.
European football fans understand this much better than American football fans do. Promotion and relegation is the entertaining crux that inspires even the worst franchises to ravenously pursue victories (and tier sustenance) in even their worst seasons. Because the threat of dropping down a level implies they’ll need to work hard to get promoted back up.
What will that look like in reality? Probably the low 20 to 25% of those 120 top-tier players being relegated and a similar number getting promoted from the second tier. For example, Max Homa’s 2025 saw him finish 111th in the FedEx Cup Final standings, his worst finish in seven years, brought on by some of his worst golf in seven years. Simply put, that level of golf will not be rewarded by the new system, and would see Homa get relegated.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, the allure is in the battle to stay up or get up. FedEx Cup Nos. 87-90 playing the nerviest golf of their season in August, aware that Nos. 91-100 could supplant them with a good week. Of course, the Tour employs promotion right now, just a much softer version of relegation. This future will likely be much more rigid.
But here’s an important element: a secondary tier with a properly-defined schedule and a universal goal of promotion would make for a very predictable schedule. It is also likely to include higher purses than what is currently on offer by the Korn Ferry Tour and the DP World Tour. This ain’t Single A baseball.
Theme No. 6: Postseason drama
The Tour has never quite figured out its postseason and it knows that. Evidence: the endless format tinkering and numerous iterations of the FedEx Cup Playoffs over the last decade alone.
Considering the Tour also doesn’t own any of golf’s five biggest entities (the majors and the Ryder Cup), it stands to try creating the most entertaining playoffs imaginable. If that means a bit of wackiness — like match play to end a season full of stroke play, Rolapp made it clear that is very much on the table. Luckily for him, we’ve already made a video about that. Check it out below.
