Golf’s schedule shakeup has begun.
The PGA Tour this week confirmed that it would not return to Hawaii, where it’s traditionally opened the season with consecutive tournaments on Maui and in Honolulu.
The long-rumored move is undoubtedly the first of several to come as PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp preaches scarcity and tries to contract the schedule. If you’re just catching up, the tour’s current preference is to create a top tier of 21-26 tournaments and a second track for lower-ranked players to earn opportunities for promotion.
The elevated track would include the four majors, The Players Championship and the FedEx Cup playoffs. You figure the eight “signature events” that already exist maintain that status. That leaves five to 10 standard tournaments to select — and a bunch of regular-season tournaments that won’t make the cut.
Now that’s much more interesting to me. Who gets the axe? I’ve got four suggestions for a shortlist of tournaments to either chop completely or demote to the second tier.
There are plenty of reasons to cut a tournament, from lack of fan interest to an expiring sponsor to even the environment on Maui, which has dealt with wildfires and drought alike. (It’s worth remembering the tour also made several missteps pre-LIV Golf, dropping popular annual stops in Boston, New York, Washington and Chicago and cold-shouldering millions of golf fans in those areas. Rolapp rightly wants to claw some of those back.)
I considered five criteria to determine which ones wouldn’t be missed: TV ratings (2025 numbers compiled by Sports Business Journal), estimated attendance (tracked by the fellow behind this website), relative strength of field (measured by Datagolf.com), consensus about the golf course and location.
As luck would have it, we’ll start with the team event that begins Thursday:
Zurich Classic of New Orleans
Most elite players, including past champion Rory McIlroy, are taking the week off because the Zurich comes at an odd time in the jam-packed schedule. A sampling of players who are in the field this week: Martin Couvra, Pontus Nyholm, Chandler Blanchet, Trace Crowe. Casual fans, are you excited yet? A shrinking New Orleans market and bottom-five TV ratings (among standard tour events) don’t help, but above all, it feels cheap for a pairs tournament to be doling out FedEx Cup points when it’s an individual sport the rest of the season.
CJ Cup Byron Nelson
I’d delete this from the calendar for the abominable name alone. That aside, TPC Craig Ranch is the real problem here. Dallas native Scottie Scheffler played the tourney last year and embarrassed the course by going 31 under par for four days. That prompted a revamp, and headlines promising the course is no longer a pushover are never a good sign. The field is weak, attendance is low and Dallas-Fort Worth doesn’t need to hog two tournaments when there’s more history at Colonial Country Club.
Rocket Classic
In 2019 the PGA Tour introduced both their Minnesota and Detroit events, the 3M Open and the Rocket Classic. The Upper Midwest is a good home for some July golf, but neither of these have any juice. I was torn between the two and nearly picked the 3M due to worse TV ratings, but I came back to Detroit Golf Club, which is flat and straight-ahead and usually quite soft due to summer rain. It’s boringly easy, with more birdies made there than any other course on tour in 2025. They left the D.C. area for this.
Wyndham Championship
The attendance is relatively low, the TV ratings aren’t better, but more than anything this choice comes down to philosophical fit. Right now the Wyndham serves as the final regular-season event for players to squeak into the playoffs. Top players never come here because they never have to. In the PGA Tour’s New World Order, it works better as a late-season tournament for the rookies and journeymen to scrap for promotion to the top track next year.
