ATLANTA – The PGA Tour’s 38-event slate for 2026 had few surprises. The majors will remain major, the signature events will again dominate the landscape, and everyone else, both non-signature tournaments and players, will continue to scramble for relevancy.
Outside of Trump National Doral’s return to the lineup — a somewhat curious move given the Blue Monster’s status as a LIV Golf venue the last four years — next year’s schedule looks much like this year’s version, and that is not entirely a good thing.
While the expansion to nine signature events with the addition of the Miami Championship seemed inevitable, given the success of the limited-field, big-money tournaments, the return to Doral only compresses a schedule that was already as congested as Interstate 20 at rush hour.
Consider one six-week stretch next spring features two majors (the Masters and PGA Championship) and three signature events (the RBC Heritage, Miami Championship and Truist Championship). That’s a lot of “can’t-miss” stops.
It’s not just the upper class who will feel more of a pinch in ’26. Those players who didn’t finish among the top 50 in FedExCup points this year will face a nine-week stretch from April to early June that includes just four full-field tournaments, with two of those being the Zurich Classic (a two-man team event) and an opposite-field event that awards less than half the FEC points (300) as a signature event (700).
There will be a similar crunch heading into the Florida swing with the Cognizant Classic framed by two signature events (the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and Genesis Invitational) and the Arnold Palmer Invitational and The Players Championship, yet another signature event and the Tour’s flagship event, respectively.
The Tour’s new CEO, Brian Rolapp, who is scheduled to meet with the media Wednesday at the Tour Championship, has probably discovered the foolishness of trying to please everyone, but it is noteworthy that next year’s schedule doesn’t seem to land with either the stars or journeymen.
“I look at it in the sense of if there’s a particular golf course or there’s something to where I don’t feel like I can play well or it’s a place that maybe doesn’t fit my eye historically, whatever it may be, then as a professional golfer, I have a hard time [going],” Justin Thomas said. “If there are places that I think people look at that way, then you have to do what’s best for that particular person. Obviously, the perfect model would be for all of us to be at all the events as often as possible.”
The addition of Doral as a signature event — whether a sign of the future or a sign of the political times — further aggravates the fear of “load management” for the game’s top players. It is a fear that took on new life earlier this month when Rory McIlroy skipped the first playoff event in Memphis.
Never mind that McIlroy appeared to strongly indicate following last year’s FedEx St. Jude Championship that he would not be returning to TPC Southwind in 2025, or that he was the only player out of the 70 who qualified to skip the opener, the handwringing reached feverish levels.
“I’ll always choose the schedule that best fits me, and this year that meant skipping a few signature events. I might skip less next year. I might skip the same amount, I don’t know,” said McIlroy, who played five of this year’s eight signature events. “The luxury of being a PGA Tour player is we are free to pick and choose our schedule for the most part, and I took advantage of that this year and I’ll continue to take advantage of that for as long as I can.”
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Rory McIlroy shares his thoughts on the changes to the Tour Championship’s format and 2026 PGA Tour schedule before reminiscing his Masters victory.
The working theory at East Lake is the Tour is considering making participation in all the signature events mandatory to be eligible for the Tour Championship, which would likely be unpopular among the stars.
To be clear, players are not against the kind of limited-field, big-money events that are becoming the norm on Tour. What they typically don’t like, however, is the kind of scheduling that requires five starts in six weeks, which is why professional golf’s version of load management has become a legitimate concern.
When the Tour first introduced signature events, there was an attempt to leverage bonuses from the Player Impact Program with participation, but that was met with mixed results. On this, the independent contractors are surprisingly unified. Instead of trying to concoct a new way to mandate participation in top events, the Tour would be better served by focusing on building a better schedule.
