PGA Tour announces new 7-event fall schedule ahead of 2024 season
The PGA Tour’s new fall schedule is finally here.
The Tour announced Wednesday the seven tournaments it will hold this fall ahead of a revamped calendar- year schedule starting in January of 2024. The seven tournaments, which will start in September and run through November, will include nearly $57 million in purses and allow for exemptions into the new schedule.
“We are launching the most meaningful updates to the PGA Tour season since 2007, the first year of the FedExCup,” Tour president Tyler Dennis said in a statement.
“The reimagining of our schedule — from the regular season with designated and full-field events to the FedExCup playoffs and culminating with the FedExCup Fall — creates distinct but connected ‘chapters,’ and within this new framework, the FedExCup Fall is now more than ever an integral part of that compelling story. There will be so much at stake — and more immediate payoffs — as opportunities are unlocked in the FedExCup Fall for the season to come.”
The fall schedule will start just before the Ryder Cup in Rome, though the Tour will take a two-week break around the biennial event. It will end with The RSM Classic just before Thanksgiving.
2023 PGA Tour fall schedule
Sept. 14-17 | Fortinet Championship | Napa, California
Sept. 29 - Oct. 1 | Ryder Cup | Rome, Italy
Oct. 5-8 | Sanderson Farms Championship | Jackson, Mississippi
Oct. 12-15 | Shriners Children’s Open | Las Vegas, Nevada
Oct. 19-22 | Zozo Championship | Chiba, Japan
Nov. 2-5 | World Wide Technology Championship | Los Cabos, Mexico
Nov. 9-12 | Butterfield Bermuda Championship | Southampton, Bermuda
Nov. 16-19 | The RSM Classic | St. Simons Island, Georgia
The Tour will also hold three “Challenge Season” events to end 2023. Those tournaments include Tiger Woods’ Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas, the Grant Thornton Invitational in Naples, Florida, and the PNC Championship in Orlando, Florida.
The biggest change on the schedule is probably the World Wide Technology Championship taking place at El Cardonal at Diamante in Mexico. The course is the first one that Woods designed with his company, and marks the first time the event has moved away from Mayakoba — which now hosts a LIV Golf tournament.
The Houston Open has been part of the fall schedule, but will now take place in the spring. Neither the WGC-HSBC Champions or the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play were included in the fall or 2024 schedule, likely ending the World Golf Championships series for good.
Winners of the seven fall tournaments will receive 500 FedEx Cup points, which will help their rankings moving into the 2024 season. The 10 players who were not previously eligible with the most FedExCup points through the fall will earn exemptions into the first two designated events after the Sentry Tournament of Champions, too.
The Tour will announce its 2024 schedule later this year, which is set to run from January through the Tour Championship in August. It will include eight designated events with limited fields and no cuts, among other things, which is seen as a direct response to LIV Golf.
"I think the emergence of LIV or the emergence of a competitor to the PGA Tour has benefited everyone that plays elite professional golf,” Rory McIlroy said of the changes at The Players Championship last month. "I think when you've been the biggest golf league in the biggest market in the world for the last 60 years, there's not a lot of incentive to innovate.
"This has caused a ton of innovation at the PGA Tour, and what was quite, I would say, an antiquated system is being revamped to try to mirror where we're at in the world in the 21st century with the media landscape … So, yeah, you know, LIV coming along, it's definitely had a massive impact on the game, but I think everyone who's a professional golfer is going to benefit from it going forward."
