PGA Tour 2026 (M)

Television caused the divorce. In December 1968 the players who made their living competing broke away from the PGA of America over the split of broadcast money and founded their own body, the Tournament Players Division, with its own board. In 1975 it took the name it carries today, PGA Tour — and between August 1981 and March 1982 it spent seven months as the TPA Tour over a branding row almost nobody remembers.

The benchmark for everything that followed was set by two players half a century apart: Sam Snead and Tiger Woods share the wins record with 82 apiece. That nobody has been able to go beyond says plenty about how hard it is to win week after week on a circuit where every tournament starts from zero.

The season has changed shape too. Until 2006 the standings were the money list: the year went to whoever earned most. Since 2007 the FedEx Cup has run things, a points system with play-offs at the end, and since 2024 the signature events sit alongside it — limited-field tournaments with purses of at least twenty million, created as a direct answer to LIV.

Scottie Scheffler won six tournaments in 2025, two of them majors — the PGA Championship and the Open — was Player of the Year and closed the year on $27.66 million in prize money. Behind him came Tommy Fleetwood on $18.50 million and Rory McIlroy on $16.99 million.

April belonged to McIlroy. He won the Masters at Augusta and with that jacket completed the career Grand Slam, the fifth player in history to hold all four majors. The U.S. Open went to J.J. Spaun, and South Africa's Aldrich Potgieter was Rookie of the Year.

And then there is the fact that explains why a season this long grips. When Fleetwood lifted the FedEx Cup at East Lake he was not winning his first big title: he was winning his FIRST PGA Tour event of any kind, after years of stacking up runner-up finishes while half the golf world assumed it would never come. You can spend a whole career close and have the circuit settle up all at once in the final week.

The year starts without its usual opener. The Sentry, which used to begin January at Kapalua, drops off the calendar over course problems, so the season starts in Hawaii a week later at the Sony Open; 2025 winners who did not finish inside the top fifty are compensated with a place in the RBC Heritage.

The deeper change is a different one, and it shows on every entry list. The tour is shrinking fields: full-field events before the clocks change go down to 120 players, none exceeds 144, and THE PLAYERS falls from 144 to 120. As a consequence the number of full cards drops from 125th to 100th on the FedEx Cup list. The reason is as prosaic as it is decisive: in 2024, 28% of tournaments had a round left unfinished for lack of daylight.

And there are three new things on the schedule. The Cadillac Championship joins as a signature event in Florida with a twenty-million purse, the Mexico Open moves to the autumn stretch, and two new tournaments appear in that same stretch: the Biltmore Championship in Asheville in September and the Good Good Championship in November.

TPC Sawgrass is the house course: designed by Pete and Alice Dye, opened in 1980, host of THE PLAYERS since 1982. Par 72 and 7,245 yards, yet it is remembered for a hole of 137: the 17th, an island green from which around a hundred thousand balls are fished out of the water every year. When it opened, Ben Crenshaw called it "Star Wars golf, designed by Darth Vader".

The 16th at TPC Scottsdale's Stadium Course is the opposite of a classical golf hole. A 162-yard par three, the shortest on the course, ringed entirely by grandstands: more than twenty thousand people shut in around one green, and the only hole on tour enclosed on all four sides.

Pebble Beach opened on 22 February 1919, the work of two amateurs, Jack Neville and Douglas Grant, who laid it out in a figure of eight to press as many holes as possible against the cliffs. Its 7th measures 109 yards across Carmel Bay. In the winter of 1982-83 a storm took part of the 17th green and the 18th tee into the Pacific.

Muirfield Village was built by Jack Nicklaus in his native Ohio and opened when he was 34, on 27 May 1974. It has hosted the Memorial, the tournament he himself runs, since 1976.

And East Lake, in Atlanta, was Bobby Jones's home course. It has been the permanent home of the TOUR Championship since 2004, and Andrew Green recently restored it working from aerial photographs taken in 1949.

The calendar is not flat: it has four levels. Thirty-one regular weeks, eight limited-field signature events with big purses, the four majors and, at the end of August, three play-off tournaments. Each step pays more points than the last, so a good week at a signature event is worth two at an ordinary one.

The play-offs work like a funnel. The top seventy on the list reach the FedEx St. Jude Championship; the fifty who survive play the BMW Championship; and only thirty stand on the first tee at East Lake for the TOUR Championship, where the FedEx Cup is decided. Three straight weeks in which each cut removes more players than a whole month of the regular season.

Which is why the year reads backwards from how it looks. Winning a tournament in February is fine, but what actually orders the season is accumulation: a player who piles up finishes without winning can reach Atlanta, and one who wins once and vanishes cannot. It is a circuit that rewards consistency over the brilliant stroke, and leaves the last word to thirty players in a single week of August.