PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp unveils sweeping changes to pro golf

Golf fans finally have details about the PGA Tour’s new division designed to increase competition and increase winners’ earnings.

PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp unveiled the new competitive model for professional golf’s premier circuit ahead of this week’s Travelers Championship outside Hartford, Connecticut.

Rolapp has prioritized modernizing the Tour since his appointment as CEO in June 2025 following a 22-year career in the NFL. Tour boards have approved Rolapp to replace Jay Monahan as commissioner following Monahan’s retirement at the end of the year, the Tour announced Tuesday. Rolapp will continue as CEO.

“Yesterday, we had a productive meeting in which our boards approved the Future Competition Committee’s proposal to create a new competitive model for the PGA Tour beginning with the 2028 season,” Rolapp said in a statement Tuesday. he said.

Instead of a single main event tour schedule, the new format will feature two different tournament series: the first, a premier circuit called the PGA Tour Championship Series, and the second, a pathway offering a path to these top-level events called the PGA Tour Challenger Series.

The new format will be familiar to fans of other sports such as football; Some leagues have different divisions that promote and protect the best performing teams, while those that are not performing well are relegated to lower divisions.

In the press release, Rolapp described it as “a new competitive model based on meritocracy, with clearer paths, higher risks and greater consistency when the best players compete together.” He added that the focus will now shift to finalizing the details and preparing to implement the system for the 2028 season.

In the run-up to Sunday’s US Open win, Wyndham Clark applauded the changes made Tuesday, telling CNBC in an interview that the Tour was in a “great spot.”

“I think this two-track system will bring meritocracy and make it easier to follow the PGA Tour, and then watching match play should be a lot of fun,” he said. “I think the Tour has made an incredible step to get better and improve their product.”

The proposed two-track system would create a schedule of approximately 23 to 24 events for the season, including the Players Championship, golf’s major championships – the Masters Tournament, PGA Championship, U.S. Open and Open Championship – season-ending tournaments and annual international team events such as the Ryder Cup or President’s Cup.

The season will run from February to August of each year and will generally consist of four rounds of 18 holes in which approximately half the field will advance to play the entire event after a 36-hole cutoff.

The tour will also bring back playoff events called “match play” where winners are determined by the process of beating other players in head-to-head matchups, rather than “medal play” where the winner is determined by the best total score in four game rounds.

Match play is similar to other championship formats in sports such as NCAA basketball or the qualifying rounds during World Cup football.

There will be another big difference in the prize money at stake each week.

The minimum amount each week for the Championship Series will be $20 million, and venues will be in higher-profile locations and larger media markets. Challenger Series events will offer purses of at least $4 million across at least 20 events throughout the season at “select venues that traditionally host PGA Tour events.”

Separate points systems will be in place for both halves, driving a promotion and relegation structure where after each season at least 90 players will retain their place in the Championship Series and 20 players will be promoted from the Challenger Series, with the remaining players relegated.

The announcement of the PGA Tour’s new format comes at a time when the competitive dynamic in professional golf is at a crossroads. The last few years have led to what some golf fans are calling a “civil war” in the sport, after the fledgling LIV Golf League made its debut in 2022 to much fanfare and endless amounts of funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

Some of the sport’s best players have left the PGA Tour ranks to join LIV Golf for huge payouts. But LIV Golf’s future was thrown into doubt earlier this year after the Saudi sovereign wealth fund announced it would no longer fund LIV Golf after the end of this season.

LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil is in the process of raising new capital to fund the league’s operations in a post-PIF world. The league retains boutique investment bank Ducera Partners and is actively seeking investment solicitation. CNBC previously reported that the league was seeking raises in the range of $250 million to $350 million to help implement its own revamped schedule and format that would focus much more on team golf franchises and competition in the future.

The PGA Tour’s revamped structure was the product of intense discussions by the Future Competition Committee, which consists of six player representatives from the Tour ranks as well as three business consultants.

The committee is chaired by golf great Tiger Woods and includes fellow players Patrick Cantlay, Maverick McNealy, Keith Mitchell, Adam Scott and Camilo Villegas, as well as current PGA Tour Policy Board and PGA Tour Enterprises Chairman and former Valero Energy CEO Joe Gorder, Fenway Sports Group Founder and Principal Owner John Henry, and Fenway Sports Group Senior Advisor and former Major League Baseball executive Theo Epstein.

“It was about bringing together different perspectives, having honest, tough conversations and thinking broadly about what’s best for the game we all love,” Woods said at the event, his first public appearance since his drunken driving arrest in March.