The PGA Tour's Fall Schedule Is Now Known and Players Know What They'll Have to Do
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The PGA Tour announced its long-awaited fall schedule for 2023 and how it will work, with seven events to play over 10 weeks including a break for the Ryder Cup.
The Fortinet Championship will kick off the fall, Sept. 14-17. Then following a two-week break that includes the Ryder Cup, the events will continue at the Sanderson Farms Championship (Oct. 5-8), the Shriners Children’s Open (Oct. 12-15), the Zozo Championship in Japan (Oct. 19-22), followed by a week off and then the World Wide Technology Championship (Nov. 2-5), the Butterfield Bermuda Championship (Nov. 9-12) and the RSM Classic (Nov. 16-19).
A player who competes in all seven of the events would have to travel to three different countries while also playing in three different U.S. time zones.
The Tour has not said how the Zozo Championship will work. It has been a 78-player no-cut event. Gone now is the Asian Swing that had been part of the fall for a decade, as the WGC-HSBC Champions in China is not part of the schedule, nor is the CJ Cup, which had originally been in South Korea before moving to the U.S. during the pandemic.
With the Tour announcing last year that it would return to a calendar-year schedule in 2024 which starts in January, ends in August and consists of a new level of designated events, there was a need to revamp the fall.
The top 50 players can skip all of the events with no consequences. Those who finish top 50 in FedEx Cup points through the Tour Championship are fully exempt into the eight designated events in 2024.
Anyone outside of the top 50 can use these events to improve their status.
That also means players are still competing to finish among the top 125 to be fully exempt for 2024.
The Tour will keep each player’s FedEx Cup points from 2023 to use as a basis for determining exempt status. There will also be a 10-player category to qualify for the first two designated events of 2024, still to be determined.
So for example: if players 51 to 60 on the FedEx points list at the end of 2023 stay there through the end of the fall events, those 10 players will qualify for the first two designated events. Obviously those can fluctuate, so there is incentive to play and try to retain your spot or move into one.
The system is a way to satisfy most factions of the Tour. The star players who lamented not getting time off in the fall and thus could fall behind in the FedEx points race are pacified; they all start Jan. 1 in the same spot.
But those players in need of playing opportunities are not forgotten. In theory, they have at least six opportunities—the Zozo field size will determine if it is seven—to either retain their card or move into position to qualify for the bigger events next year.