You're Reading: Winners and Losers of the PGA Tour's 2024 Schedule
At the week of the 2023 Players Championship, the PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan announced major changes to the future of the PGA Tour that will take place starting in 2024. There is naturally much controversy and plenty to explain on the topic. So let’s get right into it.
At its heart, the newly announced structure is intended to create power-packed fields in which the world’s top and most popular players will compete head-to-head on Sunday.
At the same time, the new structure is equally if not more so geared towards maintaining its membership and incentivizing more of the world’s best and future stars to seek the PGA Tour as the ultimate arena for professional golf.
What we know currently of the details for the 2024 season is limited. However, we do know that there will be 8 events with the classification of designated events that will offer huge payouts, be comprised of small field sizes of between 70 and 80, and have no cuts.
Designated events are new to 2023 and are apparently going to stay; however, they will undergo some minor changes.
So far this year, the PGA Tour has already hosted four designated events: the Sentry Tournament of Champions, the Waste Management Phoenix Open, The Genesis Invitational, and the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
The purses at these events are $20 million (winner collecting $3.6 million) compared to $8.4 million (winner collecting $1,512,000) for the 2023 Honda Classic – a regular PGA Tour event. The purses for 2024 have not been announced.
This year, aside from the Sentry Tournament of Champions, designated events have had field sizes between 120 and 136 and have had 36-hole cuts. Regular fields events have 144. In 2024, the field sizes will be reduced, and cuts will be eliminated.
One byproduct of smaller field sizes is that designated events will be inaccessible to less-established professionals.
Furthemore, unlike this year where top PGA Tour players were required to play in 12 of the 13 designated events, they will be free to choose which ones and how many of these events they will enter. Large purses and FedEx Cup points are in place to ensure that the top players do not skip events.
Traditional full-field events will still be a critical part of the PGA Tour schedule. These events will provide the opportunity for those ineligible for designated events to qualify for upcoming designated events.
While the four majors, Players Championship, and FedEx Cup will remain intact, the future is unclear for WGC (World Golf Championship) events.
If you listen to Jay Monahan during his press conference (see below), it is clear that he believes that the changes will benefit several key stakeholders or interested parties related to the PGA Tour: sponsors, players, and fans.
How is this accomplished?
The theory is that the designated events and incentives to play that the 2024 season will entail will lead to more star-studded fields. For sponsors’ benefit, this will produce a better product that will increase viewership and put sponsors in front of more potential consumers.
The players will be given more flexibility in their schedule and have the potential to earn even more staggering sums.
As alluded to before, fans get to benefit from a better product put out by the PGA Tour.
Okay, this all makes sense. Let’s break it down a bit more.
The impetus for the new structure is largely attributable to the emergence of the LIV Golf Tour. We will get into LIV Golf relatedness in another article, but top players including Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm have openly admitted LIV’s role in the new structure.
At a high-level view, the LIV Golf Tour represented a threat to the PGA Tour, prompting a reaction from the latter. Ultimately, LIV threatened to take the PGA Tour’s current and future stars.
Why? Because it offered players something that was arguably better than what the PGA Tour offered its players. As we saw last year, players including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, and later Cameron Smith made the decision that the offer was better.
LIV promises two key things. One being money – both enormous sums of money and guaranteed money. The second being lighter playing schedules.
Whether you personally agree or disagree with the decisions of players to join LIV, these are the facts, and the PGA Tour needed to protect its membership.
This year, over the last two years, the PGA Tour has increased its purses in response to pressure from its players and LIV. The designated events will provide more opportunities for PGA Tour players to reap generous purses (this year, designated events had purses of $20 million in comparison to LIV’s $25 million).
Furthermore, since designated events are no-cut events, every player in the field will receive a paycheck regardless of their performance.
In 2024, as it appears now, PGA Tour players will get to decide which and how many events in which they will play. When the PGA Tour releases further details, the requirements will be confirmed.
This freedom of choice provides flexibility and lightness of playing schedule.
Of course, if you are not one of the world’s best and are ineligible for designated events, your PGA Tour schedule and thus opportunity to gain either Official World Golf Ranking points or FedEx Cup points are diminished.
For the players to gain these benefits, it should be safe to assume that the PGA Tour has acquired additional funding to support the larger purse sizes since they are reducing the strictness of playing requirements.
Phil Mickelson, whether intending to be derisive or not, commented that “it’s great that they [PGA Tour] magically found a couple hundred million.” It could very well be the case that there is another layer behind the increased funding that is shadier or magical, but fans will have to make this determination themselves.
For everyone’s benefit, @PhilMickelson ROASTING the #PGATour in his post round for “magically finding a couple hundred million!” 😂😂😂@LIVLaffGolf @LIVGolfUpdates #LIVGolf
— Pro Golf Critic (@ProGolfCritic) September 4, 2022
Courtesy @Tengolf_en YouTube. pic.twitter.com/gCK6RPhrH7
For this article, we will work on the basis that things are legitimate.
The PGA Tour has struck new media rights and sponsor deals. These deals and partly the tapping into PGA Tour reserves are responsible for the extra cash.
In his press conference, Monahan explained multiple times the link between entertaining fans and seeking deals with corporate partners. Ultimately, “we’re running a business,” Monahan said.
From a business perspective, on paper, the program Monahan outlined will be capable of delivering what the players, fans, and sponsors want.
So far, the designated events have been a success.
At the WM Phoenix Open, Scottie Scheffler successfully defended his 2022 victory holding off Jon Rahm.
At the Genesis Invitational, Jon Rahm, Max Homa, and Patrick Cantlay battled down the stretch with Rahm claiming the trophy.
The Arnold Palmer Invitational provided a roller-coaster back nine with several top players, including McIlroy, Scheffler, Spieth and Hatton, holding the lead at one point. Kurt Kitayama would go on to don the red cardigan alpaca sweater as the winner.
As fans, it is always more exciting when the best and most popular players are going head to head on a championship Sunday. As Monahan points out, it is what we see in the majors:
"What percentage of the top ten, top 20, top 30 players in the world compete on average against one another at a major championship? The answer: more than 95%. What about those same top players competing together at the remaining PGA Tour events? Answer: less than 40%."
— Jay Monahan
At the early stages of what we have seen of these events, the matchups among top players are there, which makes increased purses consistent with increased fan engagement.
There are two pitfalls that crop up: 1) for non-designated events (full-field events), the fields are made less attractive; 2) the players do not want to be required to play in certain events.
These are both big issues for the PGA Tour.
Full-field events still are likely an important part of their revenue stream. Furthermore, dminishing the value of full-field events threatens the delicate balance between having elevated events and in actuality having what amounts to two tours within the PGA Tour: one for the elite and one for everyone else. Besides being confusing for fans, a two-tour dynamic creates issues for players trying to gain access to the other more exclusive events.
Scond, by forcing players to play specific events and more events than perhaps they want to, the PGA Tour again risks losing its players to alternative tours, namely LIV.
The proposed solution is to reduce the number of elevated events to 8 from 13 this year. This will help with lessening the feel of two tours as well as the number of top events that the tour’s top players will feel the need to play.
Since, unlike this year, PGA Tour players will not be required to play in designated events, incentives are necessary to ensure participation, particularly since designated events will be such a critical aspect of the tour moving forward.
The incentives are increased purses and increased FedEx Cup points. If these two incentives are successful, Official World Golf Ranking points will also increase since they in large part work on the basis of strength of field, i.e., the more top players the greater the available OWGR points.
The limited field sizes in designated events are intended to further help bolster strength of field in full-field events. The thinking is that with smaller fields in designated events, there will be more players that do not qualify and will thus enter full-field events in hopes of securing eligibility to future designated events.
There is a flaw with this thinking unfortunately. As things are currently set, those within the top 50 of the FedEx Cup standings from the prior year will be eligible for all designated events. While there will be some popular players who miss out on the top 50, largely all the popular players will not.
Therefore, these players will not have to compete in full-field events to gain access to designated events. So, what we will end up with is players on the bubble competing in designated events, but those players will still not be fan favorites.
This is the challenge the tour has in enhancing weeks like the Honda Classic a few weeks ago. Eric Cole and Chris Kirk both tightly contested the lead which helped. Unfortunately, though, since these players do not resonate with fans, the interest in the event becomes lacking.
The hope is that the top players will need to play in full-field events in order to secure their position in the FedEx Cup’s top 50 and thus their eligibility for designated events in the following year.
Monahan has explained that designated events will be scheduled early in the season, making full-field events the only option to accrue FedEx Cup points during the summer months as the race to the FedEx Cup heats up.
At the end of the day, all this discussion is theory and perhaps even speculation. We will not know for sure how everything will play out and how successful the incentives will be until they actually happen in 2024.
That being said, the PGA Tour is not going into this blindly. They have run the numbers and met with their players to come up with a plan that they believe will lead to the best possible outcome for everyone.
"The model right now which suggests that roughly a little north of 60% of the players in the top 50 will retain their position. So, more than a third will not. … When you look at the top 125 in our current system, the turnover rate there is 25%."
— Jay Monahan
These percentages Monahan describes above are the churn rate. The higher the churn rate, the more likely we should see players compete in more events, both full-field and designated events. They need to play in the events to avoid losing playing privileges.
Again, we will have to wait and see how things will unfold. The problem still remains that the top golfers want to play less but fans want to see them more. Incentives or not, it will be interesting to see if the new PGA Tour structure proves effective for its fans and sponsors while also giving players what they want in order not to lose them.
That is where things stand with the PGA Tour, its players and its competition with LIV Golf to keep its players. The topic is controversial. Some applaud the PGA Tour’s efforts to innovative and restructure. Others worry about the division that could materialize between very elite players and other PGA Tour players. Still others mock the hypocrisy of the PGA Tour and, from their perspective, its evolution towards becoming LIV Golf.
If you are interested in a deeper dive into the topic of LIV Golf and the possible hypocrisy displayed by the PGA Tour, Golf Surfer™ has you covered in Is the PGA Tour Copying LIV Golf?.
