For anyone choosing to nitpick the PGA Tour’s reimagined competitive structure revealed by CEO Brian Rolapp last Tuesday at the Travelers Championship, there is only one bothersome issue.
That it won’t go into effect until 2028.
The new, two-track tour model – built around promotion, relegation and the game’s beloved credo of meritocracy – does more than redefine the week to week cadence of PGA Tour golf. It arrives at just the right time, waving away the challenges of the recent past, ushering in what will feel like a fresh start without sacrificing the familiarity at the core of the tour’s enduring appeal.
The goal was to make a good thing better and the plan that emerged, cobbled together through hours of brainstorming, more hours of Zoom calls, conversations big and small and, most importantly, a willingness to move in a different direction, has done for the tour what a proper remodeling project does.
It makes it better.
This is not a teardown but a refining of what existed, replacing what felt tired or in need of repair with fresh ideas, enhancing the essence of what can be fairly called a product but one with an uncommon level of passion attached to it.
Change can be hard and, in the tour’s case, it felt needed.
Rolapp was brought in to renovate the tour and, with the help of big thinkers like Theo Epstein and players who embraced the opportunity to reshape their own futures, this is what emerged after Rolapp told his congregation to start with a blank sheet of paper.
“We started with all sorts of ideas – some good, a lot bad,” Rolapp said.
The process was segmented. Part one was understanding what the market wants, what the tour does well and what it can do better. Then came working through potential scenarios, poking holes in bad ideas, accentuating the good ones, settling on a two-level structure.
“We landed on this two-track model as finding a great balance between more playing opportunities for guys, schedule predictability – which is something that the vast majority of our membership has never had so that’s a huge quality of life thing – and creating a really premium Championship Series that’s going to be the economic driver of everything here,” said Maverick McNealy, a key member of the Future Competitions committee headed by Tiger Woods.
“We’ve got 18 months to figure out the nuance and there’s still a lot. We’ve got a foundation, we’ve got a framework, now we’ve got to make it really perfect for ’28.”
Lucas Glover
The Championship Series will feature about 120 of the top players with a schedule of 23 or 24 events, including the majors, the Players Championship and the yet-to-be-finalized playoff at the end of the season.
The Challenger Series will provide another 150 or so players a schedule of about 20 events with minimum $4 million purses structured so that the best of them will move up to the top series the next year.
Both are aspirational. The goal on one is to rule the golf world. The goal on the other is to have the chance to rule the golf world. A shared bloodline with a big brother/little brother dynamic.
The devil, of course, is in the details and there are plenty of those to be worked through in the coming months.
“We’ve got 18 months to figure out the nuance and there’s still a lot. We’ve got a foundation, we’ve got a framework, now we’ve got to make it really perfect for ’28,” said Lucas Glover, chairman of the player advisory council and a valuable voice in the room where it happens.
It has been 19 years since the FedEx Cup era began and, while it has been an improvement over how the tour gradually faded to black in the fall, it has always felt somehow less than what it should be, proving again that money can’t buy everything.
The points structure has been complicated and fans tended to ignore that. There was too much tinkering to the format, evidence that it was imperfect. And the idea of having the three playoff events in Memphis, Baltimore or St. Louis (take your pick) and Atlanta in August is almost cruel.
With the new system, there will be two big rewards. A regular-season prize that resonates and recognizes the value of seven strong months more than a couple of good weeks.
Then, a playoff prize with the teasing idea of a match-play finale, gradually whittling down the field, ideally at a fever-dream site so special that only a few fans would be allowed and there might be no need for bleachers. A place like Cypress Point, perhaps? Or Bandon Dunes? Or Chicago Golf Club?
“Think big” is how a member of the inner circle put it.
“What can we do to create the best competition, and also celebrate – Brian says it all the time – the meritocracy? It’s my favorite thing about my job is I get to decide when I get a promotion, not anyone else’s subjective opinion.”
Maverick McNealy
After next year, the Championship Series events will all have full fields of 120 or slightly more and purses that start at $20 million. There will be 36-hole cuts, soothing a sore spot among many constituencies who justifiably did not like short fields with no cuts. And sponsor exemptions will be a thing of the past.
Rolapp had to sell that idea but he made his point by saying there is no other sport that allows the sponsor to choose at least some of the competitors.
Cleaner, simpler, eat what you kill.
“What can we do to create the best competition, and also celebrate – Brian says it all the time – the meritocracy? It’s my favorite thing about my job is I get to decide when I get a promotion, not anyone else’s subjective opinion. That’s the best part about our sport,” McNealy said.
Finish among the top 90 on the Championship Series and you are free to feed from the trough again. Play poorly and be relegated, a version of the old line “you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”
There will be 20 players moving up from the Challenger Series every year (two wins earn an automatic promotion) and there are some other eligibility details to be written into the charter with the bottom line offering approximately 230 PGA Tour tickets each year.
Asked Tuesday if this is what he envisioned when he accepted his role with the PGA Tour, Rolapp said he did not have a “defined outcome” because he didn’t know enough to be certain of what he wanted and what was needed.
One year later, the collective thinking coalesced around honoring tradition while bending not just to the moment but toward the future.
“When we’re done with this, it won’t be the end. If you’re going to make a commitment to innovate and make your sport better, you’re always going to change and react and make the necessary changes,” Rolapp said.
“That’s what I mean by honoring tradition but don’t be overly bound by it. That’s not how you move a sport forward.”
This, Rolapp and the PGA Tour believe, is the way to do it.
If only it could start next year.
Top: PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp
BEN JARED, GETTY IMAGES