Bringing what he called “a clean sheet mentality” to his role as the new PGA Tour CEO, Rolapp already has formed a Future Competition Committee charged with making “significant” changes to the tour and “moving aggressively” to do it.
Obviously, the tour’s plans for next season were set in motion long before Rolapp officially took over last month for commissioner Jay Monahan, so the 2026 schedule features few changes from the season-opening Sentry through the 20th edition of the FedEx Cup Playoffs and again ending at the Tour Championship here at East Lake Golf Club. The most significant development is the addition of the Miami Championship in early May at Trump National Doral, slated to be the ninth signature event in the 35-tournament slate.
That means that more than one-fourth of the 32-tournament regular season will be comprised of limited-field events offering purses of $20 million and higher. It also translates to a potentially more hectic load for the game’s top players. Starting with the Masters in early April through the Travelers Championship in June after the U.S. Open, eight of 13 events are majors or signature events. A six-week run from Augusta to the PGA Championship features only two “swing” events.
The rich get richer. And busier. If they plan to appear in all of them.
“It’s tough. I definitely understand it,” said Justin Thoams, the two-time PGA champion, of the condensed schedule of bigger tournaments. “It definitely has felt a little bunched over the past couple years, honestly. I’m not sure how different it could feel, you know what I mean? But it’s something that it’s always a work in progress.
“I like the fact that the tour is looking at it in the sense of here we are, this is what we have this year, and we’re just going to keep trying to change it for the better as opposed to just putting it off until however many years until we feel like we have the perfect model, perfect fit kind of thing.”
