Rory McIlroy’s schedule changes suggest a bigger shift

Rory McIlroy is going through some changes.

Some are to his swing. Some are to his schedule. And some are more big-picture. But if you piece together his comments from this week and read a little between the lines? It’s easy to draw these two conclusions about the World No. 3:

1. McIlroy is doubling down on himself.

2. He’s done doing favors for the PGA Tour.

Why are either of those interesting? Mostly because they’re different. They tell us something about McIlroy, arguably golf’s biggest star. They tell us something about pro golf, too. Here’s why:

THE SWING

McIlroy showed up in the United Arab Emirates for this week’s Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship with a new-look, new-feel golf swing. It belongs to the same golfer, of course, but McIlroy says this is his most significant swing change in quite some time.

“Yeah, I probably haven’t liked the shape of my golf swing for a while, especially the backswing,” McIlroy said pre-tournament. That would seem like a remarkable statement coming from any top golfer, never mind the owner one of the most envied golf swings on the planet — but we’re actually used to hearing top golfers talk this way. Think Viktor Hovland re-tooling his swing after winning the FedEx Cup or Tiger Woods revamping his swing after winning a bundle of majors. Swing changes can be cautionary tales, but tinkering is part of the profession, and McIlroy’s first-round 5-under 67 suggested the changes will take sooner rather than later.

One reason McIlroy hadn’t made the changes before now? He hadn’t found the time. But for three weeks after the Dunhill Links, his most recent event, McIlroy said he locked himself in a swing studio and hit balls into a blank screen, focusing only on body movement. He studied his swing mechanics on a live TV feed but ignored ball flight altogether so as to avoid real-time reaction and correction. It sounded like a mental reset, too.

“I think those three weeks were important. I hadn’t had time to sort of do that over the past 18 months,” he said.

Specifically, McIlroy said, the changes are meant to “clean up” some imperfections in his swing, which have had him relying too much on “timing and match-ups in my transition and a bunch of different technical things.” After another year filled with close calls, he’s obsessed with making his game more bulletproof in golf’s highest-pressure moments.

“If I look at my year, the one thing that I would criticize myself on is the fact that I’ve had these chances to win,” he said. While he took home the Dubai Desert Classic in January, the Zurich Classic in April and the Wells Fargo Championship in May, he had several other near-misses, including a heartbreaking runner-up finish at the U.S. Open as well as back-to-back second place showings at the Irish Open and Wentworth this fall. His highest-profile misses were two short putts at Pinehurst, but McIlroy knows there have been moments when iron shots have let him down, too.

“For me, it’s something just to make my golf swing more efficient, and then if it is more efficient, then it means it’s not going to break down as much under pressure,” he said. “When I’ve had these chances to win, okay, some may have been because of the putter but others have been because of my ball-striking letting me down as a crucial point. I think just trying to clean all that up so that whenever I do get under that pressure, you know, I can have a hundred percent trust in my swing and know what’s going to happen.”

It’s no secret that McIlroy wants a major championship more than anything else in the world. Now we know the next thing he’s doing to try to get across the line.

THE SCHEDULE

In an interview with James Corrigan of Telegraph Sport, McIlroy let slip that he plans to strip back his PGA Tour schedule next season. This isn’t a shocker — by the end of the season, McIlroy had intimated that he was worn down and that he’d played too many events — but it’s still striking to see which events he plans to miss.

For starters, McIlroy almost never plays the Sentry, the Tour’s season opener in Maui. And he also doesn’t plan to return to some of the one-off tournament starts he made in 2024 including the Cognizant Classic in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., the Valero Texas Open in San Antonio and the RBC Heritage in Hilton Head. The latter two sandwich the Masters, which suggests McIlroy will try a different strategy as he heads to Augusta National next season. (He’s gotten into the habit of playing the week before majors, but it sounds like that’ll change.)

One other change: If he plays up to his usual standards, McIlroy also suggested he may skip the first event of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, where he finished T68 (out of 70) in 2024.

“I’ll probably not play the first playoff event in Memphis,” he told the Telegraph. “I mean, I finished basically dead last there this year and only moved down one spot in the playoff standings.”

Plenty of people, this writer included, would understand punting on an early-August trip to Memphis, which would seem like a more logical Tour stop in the spring rather than the sweltering summer. But it’s notable that McIlroy’s theoretical sit-out would come the week of the FedEx St. Jude Championship, a home game for the Tour’s biggest sponsor.

This is also McIlroy shrugging at a system he helped create. Two years ago he trumpeted the Signature Events as a way to strengthen the Tour and suggested top pros play ’em all. In 2025, including the playoffs and the Players, the Tour will have 12 Signature Events — and it sounds like McIlroy plans to skip three of ’em.

Interestingly there’s at least one event he’s added to his schedule (and we’re not talking TGL): a December debut of “The Showdown” featuring McIlroy and World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler in a crossover match against LIV Golf’s Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, four individual players exercising their freedom even as their respective leagues remain at an impasse.

It’s a fun exhibition and an easy one-day one-off event. But it also seems like a telling substitution.

3. THE BIG PICTURE

Perhaps no golfer has had a more public nor more dramatic relationship with the pro game’s shifting landscape than McIlroy. When LIV Golf began in 2022 he took up the unofficial mantle of PGA Tour spokesman and fought alongside Tiger Woods to keep the Tour’s best players together. He was an outspoken critic of some of those who’d left and the way LIV had divided the game.

But when Tour brass reached a preliminary agreement with LIV, that fight suddenly felt foolish. McIlroy admitted he felt like a sacrificial lamb; that was the end of his time as unofficial Tour spokesman. As golf’s increasingly dull wars have dragged on, McIlroy — who left the Tour’s Policy Board (and was blocked from coming back on, though he was named to a transaction subcommittee, and I can hear you yawning from here) — has pushed for the sides to find common ground, suggesting that a unified tour is the only way to avoid irreparable harm being done to the sport. McIlroy looked plenty friendly with both PGA Tour commish Jay Monahan and PIF head Yasir Al-Rumayyan at the Dunhill, a reminder of how the landscape has shifted and he’s shifted with it.

This week in Abu Dhabi McIlroy shot down rumors that a PGA Tour-Saudi PIF deal had been struck and suggested that there’s still a ways to go. “It’s the first that I’ve heard of it,” he said, adding, “I think I would have heard if there was”. Any deal needs the approval of the Department of Justice, after all, and wouldn’t happen overnight. But if the DOJ was amenable to a deal, as one reporter suggested…

“It would be a huge moment,” McIlroy said.

McIlroy has also trained his eye on Europe, as he tends to this time of year; he’s hoping to secure his sixth Order of Merit on the European circuit and the Race to Dubai concludes next week.

“I’m a European player. I would like to go down as the most successful European of all time. Obviously Race to Dubai wins would count to that but also major championships and hopefully I’ve got a few more Ryder Cups ahead of me as well,” he said.

He also knows that the DP World Tour is trying to find its place in this new world order, too. Like many of his fellow PGA Tour stars in this week’s field — think Tommy Fleetwood, Shane Lowry, Adam Scott — McIlroy parachutes in when he can but he still misses the bulk of the DP World Tour’s season, arriving post-PGA Tour playoffs for a fall residency in Ireland, England and Scotland before finishing the year in the Middle East. In his ideal golf world the top circuit’s schedule would incorporate some of the national opens that are hallmarks of the DP World’s schedule.

“There have to be some tournaments dispersed throughout the year for the tour to stay relevant, not just in a four-month window but a little bit more than that,” McIlroy said. “Yeah, look, we’ll see what happens. I think I’ve articulated that I think the European Tour is in a good spot because it might have a couple of different options going forward.”

McIlroy thinks his home tour has done well to keep its options open. He seems to be positioning himself the same way.