It’s not that Tiger Woods said the quiet part out loud but, during his pre-tournament media session last week at the Genesis Invitational, the man in charge of engineering the PGA Tour’s future schedule acknowledged the reality of the rumors and speculation zigzagging around the tour.
There were no details – those are expected to be floated sometime in March, most likely around the Players Championship – but change is coming.
Potentially seismic change. At this point, that’s hardly news. The question is what the impending makeover will look like.
The mission statement should be simple:
Don’t mess it up.
The PGA Tour is in a very good place these days and, while successful enterprises stay that way through careful innovation and reinvestment, there are reasons for the momentum running through the tour’s business these days.
Star power. Golf’s continuing boom. A world-class product.
It now has the added benefit of having a collection of some of the most successful people in professional sports helping plot what’s next. But just because Theo Epstein convinced Major League Baseball to modernize its game with exceptional results doesn’t mean there is a one-size-fits-all approach that can be applied to the PGA Tour.
The intention under new CEO Brian Rolapp isn’t change for change’s sake even if he leans into the “if it’s not broken, break it” idea. It’s how to make a good thing even better while also producing a healthy return on multiple investments.
Striking the right balance between too much and not enough may be the most important part of whatever Woods and the future competition committee put forward when they offer a glimpse at how they see the tour’s week-to-week future.
“We may not be able to implement all of it in 2027, but there will definitely be parts of it integrated or changed from what it is now in ’26 into ’27.”
Tiger Woods
As the Sunday television ratings from the final round of the WM Phoenix Open demonstrated – they were at a seven-year high though the event ended around kickoff time for the Super Bowl – the tour is blessed with more buyers than sellers these days.
What comes next is the intriguing part.
“We may not be able to implement all of it in 2027, but there will definitely be parts of it integrated or changed from what it is now in ’26 into ’27,” Woods said last week.
Speaking to multiple tournament directors last week, they said they don’t know what will happen to their events or anyone else’s after this year. Then they asked what other people are hearing.
The two Hawaii events could be gone. The idea of moving a Torrey Pines event to late summer has been floated. Both Woods and Genesis president and CEO José Muñoz said moving the Riviera event to late summer is one of the ideas being considered.
“I think this is a possibility. We’re very open minded and willing to make things better,” Muñoz said.
Starting the season on the football-quiet week between the NFL’s conference championship games and the Super Bowl is a plausible notion though the big game will shift one week later starting next year, meaning the tour would wait until the first week of February to start.
That would leave a void in January, and voids have a way of being filled.
There is talk of scarcity, more conceptual than concrete at the moment. Off weeks after major championships. Or is it off weeks before major championships?
Changing the FedEx Cup playoff structure, again, perhaps incorporating West Coast venues. Creating big events in tour-empty markets such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston makes sense.
Because of Rolapp’s NFL background and the league’s enormous popularity, it stands to reason the PGA Tour should at least see what lessons can be applied even if it’s a cleats-to-soft-spikes comparison.
“It’s a short [NFL] season and then once it goes away, people miss it. From a marketing perspective it’s genius, right?,” Rory McIlroy said recently when asked about the NFL model.
“They drip feed things. It’s the combine, then it’s the draft, then it’s preseason. It’s like OK, the season is short but they drip feed just enough to keep you really interested the whole way through the year. As we as golfers are contemplating going to more of that scarcity model, there’s certainly a lot to be learned from the NFL from that standpoint.”
It’s like a grab bag of ideas have been floated. Many, no doubt, have been discussed. Some of them have probably come from talk-show and message-board wish lists.
Here’s one worth leaning into: Expand the signature events (assuming those continue in some form) to include 120 players with a 36-hole cut. If they can make room to add players every time Brooks Koepka wants to play this year, expanding fields for the bigger events should be included on the tour’s to-do list.
Multiple constituencies. Multiple agendas. Multiple opportunities.
“I think it’s trying to serve literally everyone, from the player side of it, from our media partners, from all of our title sponsors, from the local communities or even changing venues and going to bigger markets,” Woods said.
“It’s what do we need to do from a competitive model to make our tour the best product it can possibly be each and every year and still have room for development. How do we do all of that at the same time?”
New models don’t mean horseshoeing history to fit a marketing narrative. The Players Championship stands alone, one of one, and deserves to be celebrated. Anyone making a wish list of events to attend, the Masters is the obvious No. 1 and the Players Championship is a solid No. 2.
Call it scarcity. Call it a reimagination. Call it the future. The tour seems intent on making less into more, a concept Woods tried to articulate last week.
This is where the honoring history part matters. There are four major championships.
If the new model wants to tweak the majors, consider moving the PGA Championship back to August to reduce the traffic jam of big events from the Players through the U.S. Open in June.
The PGA Championship’s move to May has been successful but not transformative. “Glory’s last shot” had a ring to it in late summer even if it tended to get soaked in sweat.
There is, however, the additional problem of shoehorning the Olympics into the schedule every four summers.
“We’re going to get more top players playing and we’re going to make it more competitive by having – we’ll have fewer cards, so that in itself is going to make it more competitive just to be out here,” Woods said.
“Having Brooks [Koepka] come back, having Patrick Reed play as well as he is and committed to coming back to the tour, having Scottie as dominant as he has been, and to have Rory complete the career Grand Slam, you have a lot of top players, but also you have a lot of youth that has come up during that time.
“So trying to create that opportunity, trying to create the right competitive model and the environment to foster that, that’s been the greater challenge of it all.”
Getting it right has never been more important.
Top: PGA Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida
COURTESY PGA TOUR