PGA TOUR: Why the fall schedule is more important than ever before

The PGA TOUR’s fall schedule used to be an afterthought to the top level of pros, but with the revamped schedule, the best in the game would do themselves a favor to tee it up a few more times before Thanksgiving.

Top PGA Tour players ignore the fall tournaments at their peril.

FedEx Cup points have made the RSM Classic, hosted by Davis Love III, or next week’s Safeway Open as important a victory as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am or the Genesis Open, the Arnold Palmer Invitational or The Memorial.

Even though the first-place money may be slightly different. It wasn’t always so, but this is a new reality.

For decades, the fall had been a time when many top players rested, relaxed, just didn’t play competitive golf. As it was explained to me back in the Pleistocene Era, the fall was a time when guys who had secured their spot for the next season didn’t play so that those farther down the money list would have a chance to earn enough cash to keep their cards for the next season. In those days, the season ended in November.

In addition, the fall was an opportunity for college golfers, who turned professional after the U.S. Amateur in August, to attempt to get a PGA Tour card without going through Q-School (which no longer exists as a direct path to the big show). A few players got to the PGA Tour this way, the most famous of which was Tiger Woods.

In 1996, Woods played the Masters, the U.S. Open and the British Open because his U.S. Amateur victory got him exemptions to those events. Then he began his assault on fall PGA Tour tournaments in an effort to win as much as the 125th player on the PGA Tour money list, which at the time was the standard for earning a card for the next season. Like every other non-PGA Tour member, he was allowed seven exemptions per to get to his goal.

The first tournament to let him enter was the Greater Milwaukee Open, which is no longer played. There, he made the famous “Hello, world,” address, made the cut and finished T60.

It was on to the Canadian Open where he finished 11th. Obviously, he was trending in the right direction.

His next exemption was the Quad City Classic. He entered the final round with a one-shot lead, and a lot of media people left the Presidents Cup to go to Quad Cities in case Woods won. I know because the directions I gave those who had never been to that part of the world were: find Chicago, go west, you can’t miss it.

Woods had a one-shot lead Saturday night, but veteran Ed Fiori, playing on a medical exemption, pulled out a victory and went into the history books as one of the few to overcome a Woods lead.

From there, Woods went to the B.C. Open, again, no longer a PGA Tour event. (The location has become a PGA Tour Champions event, the Dick’s Sporting Goods Open.)

Woods was three shots behind leaders Fred Funk and Pete Jordan at the start of his round on Sunday. During the afternoon, storms materialized, wiping out the final round, which was never played. Funk and Jordan had a playoff, which was won by Funk. At the end of that tournament, Woods needed just $60,000 to earn his PGA Tour card for 1997.

Next up was Las Vegas. Woods edged his way up the leaderboard, and after 90 holes, he was tied with Davis Love III, who became Woods’ first PGA Tour victim.

“I had a limited number of events to earn my card, so this was really important,” he told the Las Vegas Review Journal in 2016. Woods said he still has the giant winner’s check hanging on his wall.

So, after five events, he found the victory circle. He had his PGA Tour card, and he could have relaxed, but he didn’t.

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Woods’ next event was the Texas Open, where he finished third. The final event of the 1996 regular season was the Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic, another tournament no longer played. There, he shot four rounds in the 60s, and hoisted a second trophy in less than two months on the PGA Tour.

Not only that, Woods went on to play in the Tour Championship just eight weeks after turning professional.

Yes, there’s a chance a very talented player could still do the same thing Woods did. In fact, these days, many Korn Ferry Tour players and many players with no standing still hope to match Woods’ feat. But they will definitely have a harder time succeeding in the fall once the top players realize they are missing out if they don’t play the fall events and start collecting precious points.

In recent years, players like Bryson DeChambeau and Matt Kuchar have gotten a leg up in the FedEx Cup standings with victories in the fall and then early in the year. Others have found winning fall tournaments were a springboard to success later on.

Justin Thomas’ first two victories were in the fall with back-to-back titles at the CIMB Classic. Patrick Cantlay, who won The Memorial this season, earned his first victory at Las Vegas in 2017.

Two veterans can also point to the fall as a successful time in their careers. Jim Furyk won in Las Vegas three times, including his first victory in 1995. Jimmy Walker, who went on to win the PGA Championship, first tasted victory in the fall at the 2013 Safeway Open.

So starting right now, with the 2019-2020 season, because of the change in PGA Tour schedule and because of the equal FedEx Cup points for winning fall events, the tournaments between now and late November just aren’t what they used to be.

They are much, much more important.

Smart PGA Tour players would shift their attention to the time between Labor Day and Thanksgiving as a way to pad their points and pocketbook. Then they don’t have to panic in the late spring and early summer when the crush of tournaments after the U.S. Open pushes them to exhaustion in an effort to make the FedEx Cup Playoffs.

Next. Ranking the four finalists for 2019 PGA TOUR Player of the Year. dark

They can bank points early and take a week off later. It will be interesting to see how many figure it out.

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