New PGA Tour Schedule: Three New Events, Labor Day Finish in 2019
The PGA TOUR released its full 2018-2019 schedule on Tuesday. Three new events will debut, a few high-profile events will move, and the season wraps up around Labor Day. How will this affect the way players approach their slate?
The new 2018-2019 PGA Tour schedule was unveiled Tuesday. It covers the portion that goes from this fall (October 1st) through next summer (August 25th). Three events are missing, one has changed title sponsors, and two new ones were added. In addition, there will be more aggressive cuts in the Playoff events.
Here are the headlines: Houston departs its spot, and so does The Greenbrier. They will move to the fall of 2019 and be a part of the 2019-2020 schedule. So, gone for next season, but not forever.
The FedEx Cup Playoffs lost an event, the Dell Technologies Championship in Boston. The Playoffs are now the Northern Trust, BMW and Tour Championship. If you are a PGA Tour golfer, this actually makes more sense. If you are a fan, this makes each event more intense. The cuts are top 125 players for the Northern Trust, 70 for the BMW and 30 for the Tour Championship. Boston won’t be left out in the cold entirely, as the Northern Trust will rotate between there and New York.
Having only two events before the Tour Championship means that unless a player is at the top of the FedEx Cup standings, he can’t afford to skip either one of the first two tournaments and get to the Tour Championship. That was always a flaw in the Playoffs, something to keep PGA Tour players playing, and it is now fixed. Having the aggressive cuts, 125 to 70 and 70 to 30, will make performance in the first event even more important.
The 2019 season will now end with the Tour Championship before Labor Day, but unless you’ve been asleep for a year, you already knew that .
That part of the calendar that is currently Labor Day through mid-to-end of September will have events filling it in 2019-2020. We just don’t know what they are yet and where they will fall.
Today’s announcement by the PGA Tour said that the tournaments in Houston and at The Greenbrier will come back in those weeks. We will just have to wait until the Tour has everybody locked for 2019-2020 in to find out.
Beware the ides of March? Not so much, but look out for some major changes
The biggest relief for most PGA Tour Players is that it’s mostly normal up to the end of February. Between the west coast tournaments and the March Swing, the WGC Mexico will be played. Finally, that makes sense.
March brings big changes in tournament order, which was revealed by Morning Read last spring. However, no dates were known for certain until today.
The March slate will be Honda Classic, Arnold Palmer Invitational, The Players and Valspar, a legitimate month-long Florida swing. The Players finishes on St. Patrick’s Day, and hopefully fans will come equipped with both earmuffs and sunscreen, because trust me, you never know what you are going to get that time of year. Except wind. I live one mile north of the TPC Sawgrass clubhouse and believe me, March can come in like a lion and go out like a lion. On the plus side, for those who love car wreck golf, the monster at the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass just got its fangs back.
It’s also going to be a big decision for PGA Tour players to decide which of these events, if any, to skip. They aren’t going to skip The Players. And you don’t want to come to the biggest tournament on the PGA Tour schedule unless you are sharp. Do you get sharp practicing at home? Or do you get sharp playing? It’s different for each guy.
With the end of March, similar names appear.
Valspar is followed by the WGC Dell Match Play, Valero Texas Open and The Masters, which finishes on April 14th.
The spot after The Masters has been owned by RBC Heritage for some time, and it is right there where you’d expect it to be.
Leading up to the new PGA Championship spot, which is the week of May 13th-19th, it’s Zurich Classic, Wells Fargo and the AT&T Byron Nelson.
After the PGA, it’s Fort Worth’s new title event, the Charles Schwab Challenge, followed by The Memorial, the Canadian Open, and the U.S. Open. Whether it makes sense to split the Texas tournaments with the PGA in the middle is an unknown, but with the PGA of America moving to Texas, maybe they like it that way.
It’s an excellent calendar location for The Memorial. If you are looking for glassy greens to get you U.S. Open ready, The Memorial is the place to be. In early years, they had to slow those greens down for PGA Tour play because it was too easy to putt off of them. In fact, if the recent U.S. Open had the greens of The Memorial, they would have been wonderfully ultra-fast, instead of like putting on a bed of broccoli.
It’s a so-so time of year for Canadian Open play. Grass just starts growing up there in late May.
The new PGA TOUR schedule makes the mid-summer stretch much more impactful
Here’s the home stretch, where it starts to extremely interesting.
After the U.S. Open, Travelers returns followed by the new Rocket Mortgage Classic (Quicken Loans as sponsor) in Detroit. Expect to see Rickie Fowler there because Rocket Mortgage is part of Quicken Loans. The new 3M Open in Minneapolis is next and, after that, the John Deere Classic which always has that charter flight to take golfers to the British Open if they are entered.
Immediately on the heels of the British Open is the new WGC FedEx St. Jude, which replaces the WGC Bridgestone, followed by the Wyndham which moves up two weeks to finish July 29th.
Firestone is out of the PGA Tour for the first time since it became a regular stop in 1954. It will now be the home of PGA Tour Senior Players Championship. In a way, it is kind of a shame because it was one of the great old courses, like Riviera, where guys could measure their play against the greats of at least the last 60 years. No more.
The FedEx Playoffs have shrunk by one event. The Barclays is gone. The new FedExCup playoffs begin in August with the Northern Trust, followed by the BMW followed by the Tour Championship. If a top-level Tour player wants a break after the British Open, he has a choice of two weeks to skip.
One’s the WGC FedEx St. Jude and the other is the Wyndham. The top 64, probably, will get into the WGC and the rest, if needing to get into the top 125 or improve their position, will play Wyndham. If someone plays the British Open and both those events and then goes to the playoffs, they will be exhausted by Labor Day!
The big winners could be those who focus on the fall
When does the Ryder Cup fall? When does the Presidents Cup fall? These will change. Actually, we know the Presidents Cup will be played in December in 2019 in Australia, so that’s been moved beyond any season. The 2020 Ryder Cup location is Whistling Straits, and that third or fourth week of September may change.
What will this do to scheduling for guys on the PGA Tour? For the first two-thirds of the season, it’s not a big change. For the last third, it probably depends on where they fall in the pecking order of world ranking and FedEx point systems.
More from Pro Golf Now
- Golf Rumors: LIV set to sign Masters Champion in stunning deal
- Fantasy Golf: Grant Thornton Invitational DFS Player Selections
- Brutal return leaves Will Zalatoris looking towards 2024
- Stars You Know at World Champions Cup Starts Thursday at Concession
- Fantasy Golf: An Early Look at the 2024 Masters Tournament
What does it do to the fall? It opens up more opportunity for those wanting their first victory.
If someone is winless and has been struggling to get into the top 100, for instance, the best plan might be to play a lot in the fall events because a victory there gets as many FedEx points as a victory in February. Typically, the top players do not enter those. They are majored out and Cupped out and want a rest. You don’t see them in the first four events of the new season, the exception being guys who are on their way to the Asia events who stop at Safeway to pick up some cash or points on the way across the ocean.
While you may think the fall events are not significant, ask Tiger Woods when his first PGA Tour victory was. In the fall. Ask when his second victory was. In the fall. Ask Justin Thomas when he first won. In the fall. It can be a great way to kickstart or rekindle a PGA Tour career. The money spends and the title counts as much as a tournament in January. The smart guy would enter four or five fall events and maybe take a break in the spring before the slam dunk into the FedEx Playoffs.
Next: John Deere Classic Power Rankings
Foreign players who are trying to play two tours may have more of a challege early, but with the PGA Tour finishing up in August, they can go to their home tours for more weeks in the fall.
It will be interesting to see what choices people make and how it works for them while trying to maintain FedEx points status, world ranking status and sanity.