While some details about the PGA Tour’s 2024 schedule were leaked last week, there remained plenty of juicy titbits to chew on when the tour made its official announcement on Monday about next season. Among them:

• Of the 36 events in the FedEx Cup regular season, there will be eight designated tournaments — now called “signature” events — with limited fields and $20 million purses in addition to the four majors and Players Championship, along with 18 full-field tournaments and five “additional” events.
• Three player-hosted tournaments — the Genesis Invitational (Tiger Woods), Arnold Palmer Invitational and Memorial (Jack Nicklaus) will have 36-hole cuts, with the top 50 players and those within 10 shots reaching the weekend. Those events will also pay $4 million to the winner (a 20 per cent share of the overall purse), while the remaining signature tournaments will have no cut and pay the standard 18 per cent to the winner.
• The FedEx Cup Playoffs champion will receive $25 million, up from $18 million for this year.
• In a dramatic change for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the tournament is a signature tournament for 2024, with a field of only 80 players, and will be contested only at Pebble Beach and Spyglass Hill. Additionally, the celebrities and amateurs will compete only on Thursday and Friday.

The tour also addressed one of the biggest concerns expressed by those among its rank-and-file members: How would they be able to get into the most lucrative tournaments? In the new system, beyond the players from the top 50 of the previous year’s FedEx Cup standings and top 30 in the OWGR, there are categories called the Next 10 and the Swing 5. The Next 10 is composed of the top 10 members, not otherwise exempt, from the current FedEx Cup standings. The Swing 5 are the top five FedEx Cup points earners, not otherwise exempt, from the swing of five full-field and additional events that precede each signature event.

Translation: For players who get hot at just the right time, they get into the bigger tournaments.

The full slate for the 2024 season with all eight Signature Events pic.twitter.com/nIOkpi8K3S

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) August 7, 2023

“While winning on the PGA Tour continues to be the ultimate — and most difficult — challenge, we have further connected every tournament, with more at stake each week,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in the press release. “From The Sentry through the FedEx Cup Playoffs and into the soon-to-be-announced FedEx Cup Fall, this new cadence will create consistent excitement for our fans and reward players like never before. We are grateful to the membership — especially the Player Directors and Player Advisory Council — as well as our tournaments and partners for the collaboration that has set us up for an exciting 2024.”

In addition to the aforementioned signature events, the others are the season-opening Sentry (which dropped “Tournament of Champions” from its name), RBC Heritage, Wells Fargo Championship and Travelers Championship.

The playoff events are the FedEx St Jude in Memphis, BMW Championship (to be played for the first time at Colorado’s Castle Pines) and the Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta, which concludes on September 1.

The top 50 players in the points standings after the St Jude advance to the BMW and earn fully exempt status for 2025, and everyone else must battle for their cards during the FedEx Fall series. That portion of the schedule has not yet been announced.

Among the other interesting notes provided by the tour in its release:

• Due to continuing conflicts with the NFL playoffs, the Farmers Insurance Open (January 24-27) at Torrey Pines will conclude on Saturday for a third consecutive year.
• The Mexico Open at Vidanta (February 22-25), moves to February after being contested in April 2023.
• After losing Honda as a sponsor, the tour has scheduled The Classic in The Palm Beaches (February 26-March 3) at PGA National Resort. The tour said it expects to announce a new title sponsor in the near future.
• With a new five-year title sponsor, the Texas Children’s Houston Open (March 25-31) moves from the fall portion of the schedule.
• The new Myrtle Beach Classic (May 9-12), a 300-FedExCup point event played in the same week as the Wells Fargo, debuts at Dunes Golf & Beach Club. Other “additional” events are the Puerto Rico Open (March 4-10), Corales Puntacana Championship (April 18-21), Barracuda Championship (July 18-21) and another tournament the tour expects to announce for July 11-14.
• For the third consecutive season, three tournaments will be part of both the FedEx Cup and the DP World Tour’s Race to Dubai: Genesis Scottish Open (July 8-14); the yet-to-be-announced event (formerly the Barbasol Championship) scheduled for July 8-14; and the Barracuda Championship (July 15-21).
• The tour will not hold an event the week of July 29-August 4, when the Men’s Olympic Golf Competition will be contested at Le Golf National in Paris. The 2024 FedExCup Regular Season concludes the following week at the Wyndham Championship (August 5-11).

The post PGA Tour officially announces 2024 schedule, and there are some interesting twists appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Daniel Rapaport
What has appeared inevitable will soon become official. According to a Golf Channel report, there will be no fans or pro-ams at tournaments for the rest of the PGA Tour season.

According to the report, the formal announcement will come Monday.

Including this week’s Workday Charity Open, there are 10 events left on the 2019-20 schedule, which runs through the Tour Championship (Sept. 4-7). Each of the three FedEx Cup playoff events—the Northern Trust (Aug. 20-23 at TPC Boston), the BMW Championship (Aug. 27-30 at Olympia Fields) and the season-finale Tour Championship (Sept. 4-7 at East Lake)—will be played without fans, as will the revamped season’s only major, the PGA Championship, slated for Aug. 6-9 at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco.

The remaining two majors of the year, the U.S. Open (Sept. 17-20 at Winged Foot) and the Masters (Nov. 12-15 at Augusta National) fall outside of the current season. Neither the USGA nor Augusta National has announced a decision about allowing fans.

After his round on Saturday in the Workday Charity Open, Rickie Fowler said he previously had not heard about having no fans moving forward, but said he supported the idea.

“I think that we’re seeing that there’s been some more spikes and nothing has necessarily calmed down,” Fowler said. “In a way, it could have been inevitatble at some point where things are starting to go.”

The PGA Tour is in the midst of its fifth tournament since a three-plus month hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Next week’s event, the Memorial Tournament, was scheduled to be the first event to welcome a limited number of fans—8,000 per day—but the PGA Tour reversed course and announced that, too, will be fanless, amid rising COVID-19 infection numbers across a number of states.

Having no pro-ams for the rest of the season is a significant financial loss for the tour and each individual event, as the money raised supports local charities in the area.

It is unclear when or where fans will return to the PGA Tour. In announcing the no-fan policy at the Memorial last week, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said fans would be welcomed back “when the time is right.”

The wraparound 2020-’21 season begins with the Safeway Open in Napa, Calif., Sept. 10-13.

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