Sixteen months ago, one of pro golf’s power brokers hinted at massive changes looming on golf’s horizon.
“There’s no question match play would work for the PGA Tour playoffs,” Sam Flood told GOLF.com. “It would be dramatic for TV, and if it was done the right way, it could be one of the great moments in golf.”
Flood, the NBC Sports executive producer, was hinting at a rumor that had been circulating for months: The PGA Tour was considering changing the direction of the much-maligned Tour Championship to include a match-play format.
As one of the two people responsible for paying the PGA Tour’s current $750 million TV rights deals, Flood’s words were important at face value. But they were much more important for their subtext: The NBC head man was expressing explicit support for the idea of match play, which threw the public perception of the argument into question.
You see, Flood and the rest of golf’s TV partners had been pegged as the bad guys. Certain institutional golf sources and players had suggested that match play’s viability would die at the hands of the broadcast partners, because match play, with its long pauses and winnowing fields, threatened the intrigue and watchability of the event on TV. But as it turned out, those suggestions were hogwash — so much so that Flood was willing to stand out in the open and argue for the opposite.
A match play postseason didn’t survive the PGA Tour’s competitions committee back in the spring of ’25, but Flood didn’t give up on it. And as it turns out, for good reason: On Tuesday morning, the PGA Tour officially ratified changes to the postseason structure that will bring Flood’s vision to life, bringing match play to the Tour Championship for the first time.
In truth, the Tour’s announcement was much wider than match play — it altered the very shape of the postseason as we know it. The current FedEx Cup Playoff schedule will change entirely in the new vision, giving way to a new, three-week system the Tour hopes will resonate more deeply with fans. The changes will be implemented in 2028 when the Tour begins its new competitive model.
In place of the old system, the Tour’s new postseason will look as follows:
- One season-ending, 72-hole stroke-play competition named the “Championship Series Finale,” which will feature the top 90 players on the Tour competing for both the individual event and the season-long title.
- One, two-week-long match play competition named the Tour Championship, which will feature the top 32 players on the Tour’s season-long points list competing for the title of “Tour Champion.”
Under the new system, the Tour Championship will closely mirror the shape of the World Cup. On the first week, 32 players will take part in a three-round group stage, with eight groups of four competing to determine the top-two finishers per group. In this format, a playoff will decide any lingering ties.
The sixteen winners from those groups will then advance to the knockout stage held during the second week of the Tour Championship, filling a 16-player bracket-style competition that will be decided over four rounds. Unlike in the knockout stages of the World Cup, players who are eliminated will continue to compete in the final week of the Tour Championship, filling valuable TV dead time while the other matches are walking from tee-to-ball.
While the Tour did not provide any specifics on the venues in consideration for either event, a release distributed by the Tour reiterated plans for the new Tour Championship to “rotate annually among prestigious venues, including courses the modern PGA Tour has not traditionally been able to feature.”
These changes will dramatically alter the current vision of the PGA Tour postseason, where a complicated points system slowly eliminates players over three weeks of stroke play events until a Tour Championship winner is crowned. The old system, like the new one, was developed in the hopes of injecting new energy into the Tour postseason, which occupies a valuable dead time in the sports calendar but has long struggled to capture broad appeal.
The new postseason represents just the latest steps in new commissioner Brian Rolapp’s vision for a Tour that is simple to understand, exciting, and consequential. Rolapp’s change agenda might not be popular among golf’s originalist class, but it does not come without merit: The commissioner was hired for his knowledge of the lifeblood of the modern sports business — TV rights deals — and has spoken openly about the Tour’s need to innovate if it hopes to see TV contracts (and by extension, player salaries) continue to increase into the future.
Through that lens, these Tour postseason changes are designed to help professional golf stand out in a crowded sports world, in turn allowing the Tour to keep TV partners happy and TV contracts flush with cash.
Time will tell if the Tour changes prove to be a moneymaker, but we know already they were well-received by the Tour’s broadcast partners at NBC and CBS, just as Sam Flood told us they would be.
