Next week, the future direction of the the PGA Tour (which has been whispered about on driving ranges for months) will finally become public as its new CEO, Brian Rolapp, addresses media, Tour staffers and the rest of the world live from the Players Championship.
Can you just wait a few more days?
Yeah, you can. Mostly because you’ve been waiting for quite awhile now, through designated events, elevated events, signature events. But also because the Future Competition Committee has been meeting. And meeting. And meeting. They’ve been grinding over models for more than six months — and not always on the easiest terms — in order to haggle it all out. Patience has been important for everyone.
In the meantime, golf fans who really care about this stuff — those who watch ESPN+ for early round coverage rather than the basic morning yapping on “Get Up” — received a surprising window of truth about next Wednesday on this Wednesday. All of it from Joel Dahmen.
You remember Joel, the self-effacing media darling who starred in the first two seasons of ‘Full Swing’ for just … being himself. While the likes of Tiger Woods, Adam Scott and Patrick Cantlay are deciding the future of the Tour, guys like Dahmen are just trying to be a part of it. For the first time in nearly a decade, Dahmen holds just “conditional status” as a Tour member this season. His 2025 was not good enough, leaving his 2026 schedule very up in the air. Anyone seeking a pared down, thinner schedule, with greater scarcity and a more cutthroat competitive model for the Tour would say, “Sorry Joel — that’s one of our tenets. Play better.“
The main difference between Joel and a lot of others in his performance bracket is he probably agrees. Dahmen has shown an understanding of Tour structures his entire career, but is well aware that, right now, “there’s certain voices in the game of golf, and I’m not one of them.” It was a full six years ago now that he explained to GOLF.com the theory of a PGA Tour and a PGB Tour, where the latter consists of a lovely life, to be sure, just one distinctly beneath the preferred tee times, the biggest events with the highest purses, sponsor exemptions, flying private, flying your family private, maybe even flying your dog private.
“I’m just looking forward to being back and seeing some of my old friends I haven’t seen in a few years,” Dahmen said from the Arnold Palmer Invitational, his solid form earning him a spot in the field. “It’s nice to hang out with the big kids this week.”
Dahmen explained that 2026 is the first time in a long time he had to confront a schedule filled with “unknowns.” Every start he makes has become a big start. He’s had to be more disciplined in his process, he said, these first few months of the year — an urgency he didn’t quite have to have the last nine years when he had full status. This year, Dahmen had to wait patiently to be called into the field at Torrey Pines and PGA National (where he finished top 10 in each), all a result of that one bad season. He finished last fall ranked 122nd in the standings. The future PGA Tour will not be kind to No. 122.
One-twenty-two will most certainly fall on the side of the PGB Tour, in a tiered system with a bit of a barrier in-between. It would be easy for Dahmen to hate that, knowing that he could be walled off from some of the biggest events and biggest money prizes in the sport, at least for a full season. But he sees what a lot of people like him can’t see: slimming the PGA Tour should strengthen whatever sits beneath it.
“I’ve jokingly called it PGA Tour and a PGB Tour for a few years,” he said. “But I think the purses should be raised on the Korn Ferry as is, and if you want to make eight, 10, 12 of those events where you have the top guys from the Korn Ferry Tour come up and play.
“I’m not smart enough to figure how the points work on both, but if you graduate from the Korn Ferry Tour and you get to play in these, you call them elevated events for the Korn Ferry Tour, their points could still count towards the Korn Ferry Tour, that type thing. And then you still have the opportunity for guys who finish outside the top 125 in the prior year, and you add 50 to 75 guys from there, and you’re going to have an unbelievable field still. You’re going to have a bunch of great young talent that they can showcase. And if you want to bring in some guys from the DP World Tour as well I think it makes sense. You could fill in a field of 125 guys that would be pretty darn good.”
You’d have to be a special kind of golf nerd to understand how players would rank their way into these plausible tours, but Dahmen isn’t ignorant. These are the ideas circling around not just pro golf driving ranges but in board rooms, too. If the PGA Tour would invest in and create a rigid, second tier, where players know exactly where they rank on Jan. 1, even those not allowed to play alongside Scottie Scheffler would at the very least eliminate the “unknowns” in their schedule. They’d have a very clear promotion plan and if good golf followed, the riches of the PGA Tour await with greater certainty than the “which tour should I play” limbo Dahmen has existed in this season.
One of the final questions of his press conference leaned on that idea of limbo. Dahmen was knocked down a peg in the fall season. How willing was he to grind and fight his way back? In the seconds before he answered, you could see familiarity in his face. He had thought about it.
“I asked myself that question kind of in December a little bit,” Dahmen began, “even when I was going back and, should I go play some events on the Korn Ferry Tour or whatever it is. To be honest, I don’t know if I do. The road is so hard. You see some guys go down and come back … We’re really spoiled up here on Tour. We get to play the best events. We get courtesy cars. The money when you play well is incredible. To go back down and swallow your pride a little bit and your ego and to go to these smaller cities and smaller purses would be difficult. The family wouldn’t be able to travel as much either, and I’m thankful that my family travels quite a bit with me. So I don’t know if I would. That’s a great question. I hope I don’t have to find out.”
Plenty of his fans hope he doesn’t have to either. But if he does, the people trying to commercialize a more profitable, engaging product at the top of pro golf — the Tour that recently updated its tagline to ‘Where the Best Belong’ — would tell him that’s part of the deal.
