Closing in on the end of the PGA Tour season is what I like to call bad musical chairs. If you don’t have enough FedEx Cup points when the music stops, you lose your place on the PGA Tour. That's not a game. That's serious business.
This time, it’s a new, more vicious, dog-eat-dog, cat, elephant, lion, hammerhead shark, and wombat Tour. Here’s what’s likely to happen.
In four weeks, the curtain comes down on the 2025 PGA Tour regular season, the last one of the 125-player, all-exempt PGA Tour created by Gary McCord and his fellow players in 1983. Only 100 players from this season will be guaranteed a place to play in 2026.
Seventy of them will be determined at the end of the Wyndham. And some of them who are now inside those numbers stand to get bumped.
In its place will be a new, leaner PGA Tour with 100 guaranteed spots, plus additional slots for recent winners, major winners from the last five years, and those who have won enough tournaments to have earned lifetime exemptions to play. (The full list of exemptions for this year can be read HERE, and the list for next year will likely be similar.)
The official 100 are determined by FedEx Cup points. As mentioned, 70 of those are finalized at the end of the Wyndham Championship. Nobody can bump them out of their chairs for 2026.
The next 30 will be determined after the results from the seven FedEx Fall tournaments. The first of those is held at Napa, California, with the Procore Championship. The last is the RSM Classic, hosted by Davis Love, at Sea Island, Georgia. In between, the Tour goes to Mississippi, Japan, Utah, Mexico, and Bermuda.
Each of the fall tournaments will receive regular FedEx points, the same as the Sony Open, the Valspar, or the John Deere Classic.
For any player currently over the 70th place, there are two additional ways to leapfrog a bunch of players. They are the opposite-field events like the upcoming ISCO Championship in Louisville, Kentucky, or the Barracuda Championship in Truckee, California (Lake Tahoe).
The most anyone can win in either one of the opposite-field tournaments is 300 points, but if that 300 points puts a player inside the 70th place mark before the 2025 season ends, what a gift. Take it.
Right now, 300 points would move someone like Chandler Phillips, who sits in 118th, up to 65th, where Davis Thompson is.
Now, all of these numbers will obviously change every week until the music ends, which is after the conclusion of the RSM Classic.
All is not lost if someone does not make the top 100, except that if they are in the 101-125 position, they will have what is called conditional status. This year, conditional status would put them in 30th place in terms of getting a spot in a tournament.
First place is winners of the U.S. Open and PGA Championship, not otherwise exempt, and a bunch of other categories come after that before getting to 101-125. Beyond that would be 126-150 in FedEx points from the previous season.
What is good about that is players in this category still have a chance to show up, play well, and get themselves back into a better position with good play. What’s bad about that is it’s easier to write that than it is to actually do it.
All of this points permutation stuff is the reason players who are past winners, like Rickie Fowler, Max Homa, and Matt Kuchar, played the John Deere Classic, Fowler for the first time in 15 years. They all need FedEx points to secure their status for 2026. That kind of pressure can be mind-blowing for anyone, no matter how successful a guy has been in the past.