ORLANDO, Fla. — The PGA Tour, in its continual reaction to the rival LIV Golf tour, is drastically shaking up its scheduling and making radical changes to the sport as it’s been known.
According to a Wednesday report in Golfweek, the PGA Tour board on Tuesday night ratified a new approach to the schedule to begin in 2024 that will include reduced fields in the new designated events and the removal of the traditional 36-hole cuts.
The plan is for player fields in designated events to be reduced to between 70 and 78 players with no halfway cut.
Among the events that won’t be a part of that change are the four major championships, the Players Championship and the FedEx Cup playoff tournaments.
The PGA Tour, in response to the mega-millions LIV Golf has offered to lure players to the rival Saudi-backed tour, this year launched a number of designated “elevated’’ events with minimum purses of $20 million.
This was done as an effort to lure the game’s top stars.
Reducing field sizes is certain to rub many of the so-called “rank-and-file” non-stars on the PGA Tour the wrong way because it’ll threaten to reduce opportunities to play.
“The idea is we want top players and hot players,” Rory McIlroy said Wednesday, adding that the tournament sponsors “are going to want to pay for having the stars playing on the weekend.’’
Scottie Scheffler, like McIlroy a top-ranked player, called the change “exciting, because you’re going to have top guys in the world playing against each other and it guarantees the sponsors to have the top guys all four days.
“You can guarantee Rory McIlroy will be there on Sunday and guarantee Jon Rahm is going to be out there on Sunday. It’s going to benefit the (PGA tour) membership overall. You’ve got to earn your way still out here on tour. We’re still going to reward good golf.’’
The fields at these designated no-cut events will be comprised of the top 50 players who qualify for the BMW Championship during the previous season’s FedEx Cup playoffs along with the top 10 players not otherwise eligible on the current FedEx Cup points race.
There will also be five places earned through performance in non-designated events.
The loose plan is to have a tournament calendar that would have two designated events followed by three non-designated tournaments followed by another two designated events.
The top five point-earners from the three non-designated stops would earn their way into the next designated events.
Also, any player who wins on the PGA Tour would automatically be eligible for every designated event that season.
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