New-Look PGA Tour Schedule to Feature Two Series, Match Play

The PGA Tour Boards approved a new competitive model on Monday. The new structure will go into effect in 2028. Some of the minutiae still need to be ironed out, but here’s what we know about how the new model will work:

The new competitive structure will feature two distinct series: the PGA Tour Championship Series and the PGA Tour Challenger Series. 

PGA Tour Championship Series

• The top track, the PGA Tour Championship Series, will have 23-24 events, including the majors, the Players Championship, and international team events. 
• PGA Tour Championship Series events will have, on average, 120 players in the field. Roughly 130 players will be exempt into these events. Full exemption criteria remains to be finalized. 
• The format of Championship Series events will be 72-hole stroke play with a cut to top-65 and ties. 
• Pursues will be at least $20 million. 
• Ten of the expected 15 PGA Tour Championship Series regular season events are finalized for 2028, in addition to the Players Championship, the majors, the postseason, and the Presidents Cup or Ryder Cup. The remaining five will be filled out by some combination of existing events and new markets like New York, Denver, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. 
• The Tour Championship will have a “new look” and will be hosted across a rotation of golf courses, many of which have never hosted a PGA Tour event. The venues have not yet been announced. Match play will be integrated into the format. 
• There will be no sponsor exemptions and no alternate lists in these events. 

PGA Tour Challenger Series

• The second track, the PGA Tour Challenger Series, will be the primary pathway to the PGA Tour Championship Series. There will be a minimum of 20 Challenger Series events, seven of which are expected not to overlap with Championship Series events. 
• The fields will feature 144 players, or slightly fewer when daylight is limited, and purses of at least $4 million. 
• Similarly, these will be 72-hole stroke play events with a cutline. 

Miscellaneous Details

• Relegation: At least 90 of the roughly 130 exempt PGA Tour Championship Series players will retain eligibility into Championship Series events the following year. Those who fail to retain eligibility will have another opportunity to maintain their eligibility via a “last-chance series” in the fall. Players who fail to maintain their Championship Series eligibility after the fall will automatically have status on the Challenger Series. 
• Promotion: Players who win twice in one season on the Challenger Series will automatically qualify for promotion to the Championship Series in the middle of the season. Additionally, Challenger Series players who win a major championship will also qualify for immediate promotion.   
• Two Points Systems: Each series will have its own distinct point system. Points will not be translatable between the two series. Players are either on the Championship Series or the Challenger Series and will compete for points in their respective series, with no inter-season mobility between the two except for the mid-season promotion criteria outlined above. 
• Developmental Pathways: The PGA Tour will continue to host Q-School and invest in pathways like PGA Tour University, PGA Tour Americas, and the Korn Ferry Tour.

Takeaways

1. It’s hard to overstate how seismic and significant these changes are to the PGA Tour. This is not some simple exercise of changing some terms, logos, and shuffling around the furniture — they’re building a new house. It feels like a total rebranding of the league, plucking some elements from other sports in pursuit of clarity. Most changes in recent years, and there have been many, were done reactively to cut off LIV Golf or “retain talent,” as Rory McIlroy stated last week. This is not reactive, but a proactive attempt to change the structure of the league and form a better, more crisp product. Is it innovation for the sake of innovation and truly needed now that the LIV threat seems stemmed? Rory seemed to pose that question as well, suggesting the old Tour setup was just fine. I did smirk when I first heard the Championship and Challenger series monikers because I immediately thought of the “Legends and Leaders” divisions of the Big Ten that did not last long. We’ll see how long the branding of these new “tracks” holds, but names aside, it is a massive overhaul. –Brendan Porath

2. This new schedule and structure create a lot of clarity, something the PGA Tour has lacked for decades. Over the years, the structure of the Tour has been muddied by exemptions, handouts, and small changes to rules. As it currently stands, a young, up-and-coming Korn Ferry Tour graduate may play on the same tour as Rory McIlroy but never play in the same event as him over the course of a season.

The Tour finally has a very clear structure with the top 120 players or so in the Championship Series and the next 200 or so players in the Challenger Series. One could quibble that it doesn't allow for much upward or downward movement, but the clarity should be lauded, as it will make it really easy for fans to understand what they're watching in a given week, and for players to understand where they're playing and what they need to do to either keep their status on the Championship tier or earn promotion to it. –Andy Johnson

3. The PGA Tour is going to go on a full-tilt offensive to refute Rory McIlroy's commentary from last week's U.S. Open, in which he called the Challenger Series, or Track Two, a "glorified Korn Ferry Tour event." They'll say, ‘Well, this gives you entrance into the Championship Series, and they play for way more money than the Korn Ferry Tour.’ At the end of the day, this is just a dressed-up, fancier Korn Ferry Tour, which has always been the conventional pathway to the PGA Tour.

The Tour has ensured that the Challenger Series is a feeder to the best tour in the world, which is now the Championship Series. The biggest difference from the old PGA Tour mentality toward its feeder tour is that Challenger players can absolutely make a good living playing there. With $4 million purses, if you finish 40th or 50th on the points list, you'll still be living a nice life. –Andy Johnson

4. This structure does clean up some nebulous and unpredictable aspects of the Tour — such as how fields are constructed and events see-sawing from deep to slim based on various player schedule whims or other trends (“The Honda is hot!” “now it’s not”). This provides firmer guardrails, perhaps the strongest one simply being that a Championship Series player cannot play in a Challenger Series event. That will cause some issues. On the reverse, I do buy the notion that the Challenger guys are playing for something that is more clear: full, unambiguous status in the Championship Series. In recent years, rookies or graduates from the KFT did not know when or where they might start based on the byzantine structure of how status was sorted and fields were made. So firmer guardrails are there, BUT … within those two tracks, you’re still going to have caste systems. Not every star is going to play every Championship Series event, obviously. So some will be clearly better than others, and that may become uncomfortable and create some internecine conflict amongst the tournaments themselves. On the Challenger Series side, it seems only seven of 20 events will get “main stage” weeks, not running concurrently to a Championship Series event. So those obviously hold a higher status than the other 13 events that are essentially a current-day opposite field event, while the stars play elsewhere the very same week. The point is: we have some guardrails, but there will still be lots of subjective jostling and movement within the two tracks. This can just be a way of life in all sports, similar to how some SEC or Big Ten football teams draw much tougher or easier roads with an imbalanced conference schedule. –Brendan Porath‍

5. It's no secret, both internally and externally, that the PGA Tour's playoff system has been a dull disaster. Through its nearly 20-year existence and myriad format attempts, the intended feel and importance have never come through to fans. This new format looks to shake things up by welcoming match play back into the fold.

The plan would be to have two events held at premier courses — no, not your East Lakes, but rather something in the vein of a top-50 course in the world. The first round has been floated as a World Cup-style pool format, with 32 players in groups of four vying for 16 final spots. Once there, the finals would be a small, made-for-TV intimate event at one of the greatest courses in the world. No ropes, no buildout, and a match-play format that would yield the eventual playoff champion.

PGA Tour, you have my attention with this. Imagine 16 of the best players duking it out at Pine Valley with no grandstands to backboard off of, no rope lines or trampled-down areas from spectators, and more access and ease of setup for the television partners. The best product is always the best players at the best courses, and without a corporate buildout and with such a limited field, it should entice a lot of venues that would otherwise say no. –Andy Johnson

6. The details for Championship Series status have not yet been finalized. The specifics, once announced, are a huge deal, though. Without status, players don’t have a job. 

Roughly 130 players will be exempt into Championship Series events. Ninety are accounted for by the players who retained status in the previous season’s Championship Series events. Twenty will be the players from the previous season’s Challenger Series events who earn promotion. That gets us to 110. 

How do the remaining 20 or so spots get filled out? Some combination of tournament winners, medical extensions, career milestones, and perhaps top PGA Tour U and DP World Tour finishers? Those 20 spots will fill up quickly, and how they are allocated has significant second-order effects.

If, for example, only a handful of top finishers from the DP World Tour earn status on the Championship Series under the new competitive structure, then the pathway through the DP World Tour to the top tier of the PGA Tour just got more difficult. Will the top finisher on PGA Tour U be eligible into the Players Championship? 

None of these details will make or break the PGA Tour, but they are vitally important to the players whose careers are impacted by the changes. How, exactly, the Tour rounds out its Championship Series exemption criteria will be worth keeping a close eye on. –Joseph LaMagna