PGA Tour schedule could undergo some major changes in 2027. Here's why
Larry Bohannan- The PGA Tour's early-year events suffer from low television ratings due to competition with the NFL playoffs.
- The PGA Tour is considering significant schedule changes starting as early as 2026 to avoid the NFL.
- PGA Tour player Harris English suggested the season could potentially start after the Super Bowl.
- Possible changes include eliminating some tournaments or shifting the entire schedule back a few weeks.
It has been both good news and bad news for PGA Tour events like The American Express in La Quinta to be played in the first two months of each new calendar year.
The good news is that players are eager to start a new PGA Tour season, the weather is generally great and there are endless possibilities for every golfer as a new year dawns.
The bad news is the National Football League.
Having gone out of its way to avoid conflicts with the start of the NFL season in September by having the FedEx Cup playoffs end in August, the PGA Tour has never figured out how to avoid he NFL playoffs in January and February. For a tournament like The American Express, which has been on the third week of the PGA Tour schedule 22 of the last 24 years, including the last 20 in a row, the result is being played against important NFL games. The result of that, in turn, is television ratings that are never very good.
Could it be the PGA Tour, now with a new CEO in Brian Rolapp who came to the job from the NFL, is finally ready to make significant changes to its schedule to avoid the NFL entirely?
That idea is not all that radical for two reasons. First, we know the PGA Tour is going to undergo big changes, starting in 2026 with smaller fields in events and seemingly fewer chances for golfers to play their way onto the tour. Some scheduled changes are coming for 2026 as well, including the drought-inspired cancellation of the Sentry in Hawaii to start the new year.
Second, the new CEO perhaps brings a new perspective on the futility of fighting the NFL. So does that mean major changes seems more than likely for 2027?
No less that a PGA Tour player himself, Harris English, essentially let that cat out of the bag this week in a press conference at the RSM Classic in Georgia, the final event of the 2025 season.
“I get that they want all the best players playing together more often, and the talk of the tour potentially starting after the Super Bowl I think is a pretty good thing because we can't really compete with football," Harris said, perhaps speaking a bit out of turn.
But how could such a plan work? In 2026 alone, the PGA Tour has four tournaments scheduled before or on the date of the Super Bowl, Feb. 8, and that doesn’t include the departed Sentry event. Even if the Sentry never returns – a strong possibility – how does the tour shift four tournaments to later in the year? There seem to be three possibilities:
- Getting rid of four tournaments – We know the Sentry may not recover from it cancellation this year. The San Diego tournament is losing Farmers Insurance as its sponsor after 2026. Are there two other tournaments that could be on life support and could disappear from the 2027 calendar?
- Move the entire schedule back a few weeks – Obviously that would have to play around things like the Masters always being in April and the U.S. Open always ending on Father’s Day. But maybe having the FedEx Cup pushing into the start of the NFL season is better than having tournaments played against the NFL playoffs.
- A combination of those two options – Fewer tournaments and a shift in the schedule, maybe with a tournament or two moving to the Fall Series could move the start of the men’s golf season to mid-February.
Whatever the answer, be assured that the PGA Tour has already figured out the main components of such a schedule, including whether it actually works for its tour rather than just having it be just a knee-jerk reaction to some low television ratings on the West Coast Swing.
As for The American Express, the La Quinta tournament has a deal with American Express to sponsor the event through at least 2028, and extension talks could start after the 2026 event. So the desert tournament would seem to be safe for 2027 and beyond. That might not be true for a few other West Coast events in a revamped tour schedule.