A new era of the PGA Tour is upon us, but there are still questions about what the future holds, especially as it pertains to this week’s event and others like it.
At last week’s Travelers Championship, PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp and the Future Competition Committee, headed by Tiger Woods, announced sweeping changes to the PGA Tour’s schedule, which were ratified by the membership. (GOLF.com’s Sean Zak has a detailed breakdown that you can find here.) The long and short of it is that, come 2028, the PGA Tour will adopt a two-track system. Track 1, which will be called the Championship Series, with roughly 130 players, and the Challenger Series, with more players. There will be promotion and relegation. The schedules will be trimmed down for each series. Players will play for $20 million purses on the Championship Series, while the Challenger Series will play for purses of around $4 million.
But what has yet to be determined is which events will be Championship events and which will be Challenger events. This week’s John Deere Classic is expected to be a Tier 2 event, and if that’s the case, Jordan Spieth, a two-time John Deere champion, sees another quirk in the new schedule: Players who win Track 2 events will likely not be back the next year to defend their title.
“That is probably one of the stranger parts of the whole situation because most of the time guys go back to try to defend their titles,” Spieth said on Tuesday. “It’s definitely something that’s almost like an unofficial job that you have in a way. I would say, for the most part, if you do win, you’re most likely not going to be back at a Track 2 event. If it was a Track 2 event the year before, you probably earned your way, maybe, on a Track 1.
“I don’t know what events are going to fall where. You know, I think they’re still working on that. That would be probably the strangest part of the whole deal.”
Asked if the Tour should allow “crossover events,” where defending champions of Tier 2 events can drop down for one tournament to defend their title, Spieth said that would be ideal, but making sure they have the right product — one that is easy to follow, has clearly defined stakes at every tournament and has the highest entertainment value — should trump all.
“I think the idea is, like, how do they make it the cleanest, best product going forward for the longest amount of time, that’s the most understandable for fans, players, media, and gets the best players playing as often as possible together in the same events,” Spieth said. “I think whatever you come up with from that outweighs anything else.
“I don’t know if my opinion of if I’m OK with it or not matters at all, but I understand that that’s probably going to be what happens,” Spieth said later about crossovers not being allowed. “I’m OK with — you try to work and stay [on] Track 1. For me, I’d love for this to be a Track 1 event, obviously, but again, there’s nothing I can do about that either.”
More details of the changes are expected to be announced at the Tour Championship in August. But Spieth sees the changes Rolapp is enacting as making the Tour “more clear-cut,” while also acknowledging that what we see in 2028 likely won’t be the final product.
“My easy answer is time will tell, and things get adjusted, but it does, on paper, look like it’s just a cleaner version of what’s been happening,” Spieth said.
