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PGA Tour adding match play to playoffs with rotating venues at 'prestigious courses'

CROMWELL, Conn. – Match play is coming to the PGA Tour Playoffs.

The PGA Tour’s board of directors approved a series of sweeping changes on Monday that will go into effect for the 2028 season, including another facelift to its playoffs. For the first time, match play will be used to settle the winner of the Tour Championship beginning in 2028.

That topic seemed dead in the water just last year when the Tour removed starting strokes but opted to stop short of a more radical move on the grounds that it didn’t make sense to play stroke play throughout the entire FedEx Cup season and then shift to match play for the finale.

MORE: PGA Tour’s bold overhaul live updates: 2 tracks, fewer cards, radical finale shift

But when Tour CEO Brian Rolapp came on board a year ago, he said he wanted to start with a blank sheet and make the playoff system easier to understand and more compelling.

On Tuesday, the Tour announced that the Boards signed off on the introduction of match play into the postseason. “A new-look Tour Championship will be contested across a rotation of prestigious courses, many of which the PGA Tour would play for the first time,” the Tour said in a release.

Shaking up the playoffs, which may include shrinking to two events, will include some venue shifts – from Memphis for the FedEx St. Jude Championship, rotating venues and cities for the BMW Championship and Atlanta for the Tour Championship – with hopes of adding a big west coast finale for bigger TV ratings.

According to a source, the players on the FCC drove the bus on the playoff structure, particularly Adam Scott — who previously told Golfweek that making the Tour Championship a more prestigious event was the motivating factor in his interest to be a player director on the board — and Keith Mitchell, who finished T-4 at the U.S. Open on Sunday. One thing they made abundantly clear to Rolapp and the independent directors: venue matters.

The players want to take the playoff events to iconic venues. While this may be a reach, the Tour was investigating the possibility of Cypress Point in Pebble Beach, Calif., which did allow limited spectators to the private club for last year’s Walker Cup, and Pine Valley, another acclaimed private club on the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border, that has a future Walker Cup on the books. If either of these scenarios were to happen, it would be a scaled-down version of a Tour event and what a source described as more of a TV show in the vein of some of the Silly Season events.

“Think big, think TV,” a source said.

The nine-member FCC committee is made up of six player representatives — Patrick Cantlay, Maverick McNealy, Keith Mitchell, Adam Scott, Camilo Villegas and Tiger Woods (Chairman) — and three strategic business advisors, Joe Gorder, John Henry and Theo Epstein.

Details on the format and expected location(s) of the season-ending events beginning in 2028 will be provided at a later date, the Tour said, but consider us intrigued.

Adam Schupak is a senior writer for Golfweek covering the PGA Tour.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: PGA Tour adds match play to 2028 playoffs

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