Evolving PGA Tour reaches regular-season finale
Greensboro is last chance to make playoffs; Thor drops hammer; Shi-who? and LIV stuff
Michael Thorbjornsen earns his long-awaited maiden win at Rocket Classic (Raj Mehta/Getty Images)
As the PGA Tour ends its regular season this week in Greensboro, N.C., most of the future focus has been on the two-tiered system the PGA Tour will enact in 2028, and which tournaments will comprise those separate tracks.
Last week, the tour revealed four tournaments — including the established Travelers, Sentry at Torrey Pines and Arnold Palmer Invitational — that will be among the 15 or so events in addition to the majors, Players and playoff events that will offer a condensed season of big-money tournaments with a majority of the top players in most of them starting in 2028.
Those tournaments will make up what is being called the Championship Series. The concurrent second tier of full-field, $4 million events will be known as the Challenger Series.
What hasn’t been determined is the new season-long system and how it will work. Or if FedEx will even be involved.
Also in today’s DD …
Michael Thorbjornsen’s maiden win headlines this week in golf (while LPGA of Japan’s Shiho Kuwaki takes AIG Women’s Open in playoff)
Keegan Bradley, Brooks Koepka and others have work at Wyndham to make top 70
LIV’s second U.S. event of the year holds more intrigue off course than on it
This is the 20th year of the FedEx Cup. It began in 2007 and has seen numerous tweaks over two decades, including changes in playoff points structures, a reduction in playoff events from four to three, starting strokes in the finale and — for the first time last year — having the Tour Championship operate as a standalone $40 million season-finale for the top 30 qualifiers to determine the FedEx Cup champion.
All of this is likely to change in two years. CEO Brian Rolapp signaled as much recently when he announced the two-tiered Championship and Challenger Series plan.
“We will also celebrate a regular season winner, recognizing the No. 1 finisher who distinguished himself against the best players in the world over the course of the season,” Rolapp said. “For the postseason, we will introduce match play and a reimagined Tour Championship that will rotate among prestigious venues featuring the best of Championship Series players. This will include courses the PGA Tour has never visited before.”
As it stands now, this year’s regular season winner — which will be Scottie Scheffler — simply rolls into the playoffs with the points continuing through the first two events. The points leader through the BMW Championship is rewarded handsomely — earning $23 million on top of the purses at the first two playoff events. Second-place gets $13 million and the numbers go down to $275,000 for the 50th-place finisher.
The top 30 still move on to the Tour Championship and its $40 million purse, with $10 million and the FedEx Cup going to the winner and $355,000 to the player who finishes 30th. So getting to the Tour Championship is quite lucrative — it means a minimum of $815,000, plus a spot in three of the four major championships in 2027.
What is expected to change is an emphasis on the regular season in 2028 — with likely a large payout going to the season-long points winner — and then a separate playoff system that will simply set the field based on the regular season. How that will work is to be determined, possibly announced later this month by Rolapp at the Tour Championship.
