The PGA Tour announced Monday that next season’s FedEx Cup fall schedule will include a new tournament, the Biltmore Championship in Asheville, North Carolina. It will be held at Cliffs in Walnut Cove, one week before the Presidents Cup at Medina Country Club.
The Biltmore Championship will be the second change to the PGA Tour’s Fall Swing, as the Good Good Championship was previously announced to participate. The event will be held at the Fazio Canyon Course at Omni Barton Creek Resort & Spa in Austin, Texas.
Reading the tea leaves, it appears that the 2026 FedEx Cup fall will look relatively the same in terms of the overall tournaments being held.
The Mexico Open is normally held during the regular season, but it was not on the 2026 schedule. It will be held in October next year instead. BayCurrent will debut as the new title sponsor in 2025 and remain a multi-year sponsor, while Utah Bank and Worldwide Technology have agreements through 2027. RSM and Butterfield are out until 2028, while the Pro Core Championship in Napa, Calif., and the Sanderson Farms Championship in Jackson, Mississippi remain in flux.
If the fall schedule is retained or expanded, what did PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolup mean this summer when he announced that the new competition committee would operate on three principles: competitive parity and simplicity? and Rarity?
If scarcity is part of the PGA Tour’s schedule, the fall FedExCup would be among the first to be cut, especially considering what has happened the past few seasons — fewer PGA Tour cards, smaller fields, no Monday qualifying.
But cutting back on the number of fall tournaments would contradict what Rolup considers one of the PGA Tour’s greatest strengths (another of those three principles): competitive equality.
“All sports strive for competitive parity,” Rolup said at the Tour Championship. “Today’s PGA Tour has an incredible competitiveness and balance among its players. We will continue to focus on this while also maintaining meritocracy, which is another important characteristic of the PGA Tour. Any good enough golfer on the tour should have a chance to win, and we will focus on that and keep it that way.”
The FedEx Cup Fall Tournament is outlined as a seven-tournament operation designed to provide players with the opportunity to secure or improve their place in the priority rankings and secure additional playing opportunities for the upcoming season. Players ranked 51st through 60th will compete in the first two signature events, and those in the top 100 will earn full-time status on the PGA Tour and rank lower down the list.
The headliners at these events are not those players, but Scotty Scheffler and the U.S. Ryder Cup Team at the Pro Core Championship, Xander Schauffele at the Bay Current Classic, and now Ben Griffin at the World Technology Championshipsp. Meanwhile, notable players outside the top 50, such as Jordan Spieth and Tony Finau, have yet to play in the fall.
This may not seem like a problem on the surface — why would a world number one award matter? — but it may provide an opportunity and opportunity to improve scarcity and even simplicity while maintaining competitive parity.
1. Increase the cutoff point and increase the incentive to play
In an ideal world, the solution would be to require players outside of the top 50 in the FedEx Cup standings to play in a certain number of tournaments. But as we’ve seen over the past few years, professional golfers don’t like being told what to do. Instead, consideration will be given to adding eligibility to regular-season tournaments.
The 70-90 range of the FedEx Cup standings is a no-man’s land with exciting players like Finau, Rasmus Hejgaard, Nikolaj Hejgaard, Davis Thompson, and Cam Davis. They may tell themselves that they are far outside the Aon Next 10 (51st to 60th) and are in a good position to avoid the Top 100 deadline. Add in the exemption from previous wins and the incentive to play is close to zero.
The same goes for players like Spieth, who are already in the Aon Next 10. He may have a signature event sponsorship exemption to soften the drop in the standings — that’s a story for another day — and he only dropped one place in the standings this fall, from 56th to 57th.
The FedExCup fall champion’s exemption from all marquee events, combined with a different cutoff point of 75th place, could be enough to reschedule a player in the same position as Spieth or Finau.
2. Allow DP World Tour plays to be counted
Looking at the DP World Tour’s 2026 schedule, there are only three PGA Tour events: the Scottish Open, the ISCO Championship, and the Corales Punto Cana Championship. On the surface, the strategic alliance between the two leagues is a bit one-sided, as the top 10 players in the Race to Dubai (those who are not exempt) will qualify for the PGA Tour next season.
A way to help both sides would be to give players in the top 50 of the FedEx Cup standings the opportunity to play on the DP World Tour, even if the regular season tournament is played against a non-representative event on the PGA Tour.
In the meantime, there’s still a lot at stake, including securing a spot in the top 50 of the Official World Golf Rankings to qualify for a major tournament, but that can be achieved anywhere. With top European players like Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood taking part in the DP World Tour field, increased depth means more OWGR points can be earned.
take into consideration what Tournaments are held (Irish Open, French Open, Spanish Open); where Those tournaments are held (for example the Alfred Dunhill Links are held at St Andrews, Carnoustie and Kingsbarns). when These tournaments are held from a US perspective (in the morning before the football game kicks off). Suddenly, positive things start piling up.
3. Keep adding young players to the field
Without the top 50 players in the FedExCup standings, the structure would be simpler and give the fall season more of an identity. This is the time of year for those looking to improve their standings on the PGA Tour for next year.
Such a move could open up additional spots in these areas – there is only one top-50 player (Sam Stevens) at the Bermuda Championship – but if it were to happen, those spots would go to young, up-and-coming players, including recent Korn Ferry Tour graduates.
In 2025, no rookies qualified for the BMW Championship. That means players new to the PGA Tour were unable to secure a spot in the marquee event in 2026. That number went up to 36 after Michael Brennan won the Bank of Utah Championship.
Watching PGA Tour careers take off from the outside, players who have just graduated from Korn Ferry and soon-to-be rookies will be licking their lips at the chance to use the fall slate as a way to get their foot in the door. The players and the league will be better because of it.
