Cameron Smith plays a shot into the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass during the 2022 Players Championship.
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The PGA Tour is ready to start talking about 2023, finalizing its full schedule of 47 events for the 2022-23 season and announcing changes to the FedEx Cup and massive purse increases to go along with them.
The changes really begin in Hawaii, the unofficial start to the season, when the purse of the Sentry Tournament of Champions rises to $15 million. Not impressed? That’s $15 million spread out over a limited field of, historically, 32-34 players. That mega-millions payout structure continues during the West Coast swing. The Tour will dish out $101.5 million in prize money during a stretch of six weeks that begins with the Genesis Invitational in mid-February and runs through the WGC-Match Play in late March. It’ll include a whopping prize of $25 million at the Players Championship.
How? The Tour reallocated funds in order to elevate specific events like the Genesis Invitational, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, and the WGCs. In other words, Scottie Scheffler‘s pockets would be even deeper under the new structure.
Other notable schedule moves were outlined neatly by my colleague Dylan Dethier on Twitter:
Other scheduling notes: -No WGC-China, so Bermuda has full points and a Masters spot -CJ Cup is now at Congaree, named THE CJ CUP in South Carolina -Farmers finishes on Saturday again -Rocket Mortgage goes from late July to late June -Cosanctioned Genesis Scottish Open is back
The tournament directors and TV broadcasters both saw value in the Saturday night finish for the January event. For years, the Farmers’ final round competed for attention with the NFL’s championship weekend, and finally the event bowed out of that fight last year. That means we’ve got Wednesday to Saturday golf at Torrey Pines again in 2023.
We will also see Congaree host an event next season. The South Carolina course hosted the Palmetto Championship in 2021 after the RBC Canadian Open was canceled due to the pandemic. Congaree will host the 2022 CJ Cup in mid-October, just a few weeks into the new season.
One week after that, the Butterfield Bermuda Championship will see its winner take home Tour-status, $1.17 million, and an invite to Augusta National. The Tour’s decision to ditch the WGC-HSBC Champions, which will not be contested next season, means the BBC is leveling up. Its winner will earn an invite to play in the 2023 Masters.
Lastly, the 2023 FedEx Cup is set for an overhaul. The Tour playoffs will follow the same three-tournament structure as this season, with the FedEx St. Jude Championship preceding the BMW Championship, which precedes the Tour Championship. However, the fields will look very different. Only 70 players will qualify for the FedEx Cup Playoffs, a far cry from the 125 that will take part this year. And from those 70, 50 will advance to the BMW Championship, and then 30 to the Tour Championship. The 50 who make it to Olympia Fields for the BMW are expected to be featured in a high-money series of international events in the fall of 2023.
More details on those events will be shared at a later time, but this will notably be the final Tour season (barring any unforeseen changes) with a wraparound schedule beginning in September. Instead, the 2023-24 schedule will officially begin in January and run through August. So enjoy your final wraparound schedule, folks! It may be gone for good.
Sean Zak is a senior writer and author of Searching in St. Andrews, which followed his travels in Scotland during the most pivotal summer in the game’s history.
