SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. – Ahead of next week’s anticipate PGA Tour schedule update at the Travelers Championship, Rory McIlroy was asked his thoughts about recent reports of a multi-tracked Tour.
The Tour’s Player Advisory Council was presented earlier this month with a rough outline of a reimagined schedule, which would start in 2028. In this plan, there would be two “tracks” of tournaments, including 15 to 18 Track 1 events with 120- to-130-player fields. There would be limited opportunity to play between both tracks during the season, whether it be players being promoted upward or others playing down. Korn Ferry Tour, Q-School and other graduates would reportedly move into Track 2, which would serve as the pathway into Track 1.
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Additional details, particularly surrounding that second track of events, are unknown, though McIlroy said the quiet part out loud on Tuesday.
“Track 2 is a glorified Korn Ferry event,” McIlroy said. “That’s what Track 2 is going to be.”
McIlroy used last week’s RBC Canadian Open as an example of a potential Track 2 event, adding that he disagrees with the national open being considered a lesser event.
“I just think there’s going to be certain events that might lose their stature if a sponsor doesn’t pony up $30 million, so that’s the tough thing,” McIlroy continued. “But, look, I’m not in those rooms. … I play my schedule, and I’ll continue to play my schedule, which is getting less and less as the years go on.”
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McIlroy instead prefers the Tour’s longstanding model, which featured over 40 events that other than the majors and playoff events, were all viewed on relatively equal footing compared to the current signature-event model.
“It’s funny; they’ve done all this work, and you start to realize that the way the Tour was before LIV came along was actually pretty good,” McIlroy said. “It was a pretty good structure, and everything sort of worked pretty well. LIV created this false economy where we had to up prize funds and had to cut fields and try to support the top players and all that stuff, which I think needed to happen because that was the only way to retain talent at the time, but now that LIV looks like it’s less of a threat, I think, as I said, the old ways of the PGA Tour weren’t actually that bad.”
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