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The PGA Tour is set to debut a major postseason overhaul in 2028, and CEO Brian Rolapp unveiled the Tour’s new two-tier competitive model. Tour leadership says the changes will reward excellence over a longer regular season, and while the plan marks an important first step, Player Advisory Council chairman Lucas Glover believes there is still a long way to go. He was asked about the thought process behind the changes and Glover elaborated on why PGA Tour needs to take urgent action.

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“Scottie [Scheffler] in the last couple years has gone into the playoffs with a monster lead,” Glover said to SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio, referring to Scheffler’s historic 2024 and 2025 season. “Or any player that’s gone into the playoffs with a monster lead; any player who had a dominant regular season, whether that had been Rory [McIlroy] or Scottie or Tiger [Woods] back in the day or DJ [Dustin Johnson]. And all of a sudden you can have an average to poor playoffs, and your regular season is minimized. Or, not looked on as favorably after maybe you won six events in a major.”

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“Then to the second part of your question about why match play, well, Twitter fans and the TV partners want it. And it makes a lot of sense. You know, you get these guys playing great head-to-head at the end, and just another kind of way to promote our product and do it the way that the feedback has been given, and do it that way.”

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Glover argued that the Tour should value a player’s regular-season work more heavily, instead of allowing a rough postseason to erase months of strong play. If someone performs against the Tour’s best over 20 to 23 weeks, that body of work should matter most, with match play and the playoffs serving as a finishing touch.

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That has been the case with Scheffler, who at one point called the playoffs silly. The World No. 1 claimed the FedEx Cup only once in the last four years, with Tommy Fleetwood earning the honor last year and in 2023, Viktor Hovland sweeping it. The PGA Tour tried to address the issue by removing starting strokes and also making minor modifications, but that did little to assuage the fans.

The new two-tier model will split the schedule into the Championship Series and the Challenger Series, with the top players competing in the former and the latter serving as the pathway up. The Tour has also built promotion and relegation into the structure, giving the new system a clear sense of movement and consequence.

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That design is meant to put more elite players in the same fields more often, which should create stronger head-to-head battles throughout the season and into the postseason. As Brian Rolapp said at the Travelers Championship, the postseason will bring back match play, a format he said fans and partners have asked for, and that shift points to a very different finish.

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For the PGA Tour, that kind of setup could make the product feel sharper and more competitive. Viewership has been a challenge in recent years, so a postseason built around match play and bigger stakes could help draw more attention when the season reaches its most important stretch.

Rolapp’s approach also lines up with Lucas Glover’s view that the Tour should reward season-long excellence more clearly. If the new model finds the right balance between merit and match play, the 2028 overhaul could reshape the way the Tour ends its season.

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Kailash Bhimji Vaviya

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Kailash Vaviya is a Golf Journalist at EssentiallySports, covering both the PGA Tour and LIV Golf. His reporting spans major championship contention, player performance, and the ongoing tensions between the two circuits, from the financial pressures LIV players face to the tour politics shaping where careers go. He has followed golf closely since his college years, and that long-running familiarity informs how he covers the game, placing week-to-week results within the bigger structural stories around them. Before joining EssentiallySports, Kailash wrote for Comic Book Resources (CBR) and Forbes, where he developed a research-driven approach to sports and media reporting. He brings that same attention to accuracy and structure to his golf work, with particular depth on the business and political side of the professional game alongside the competitive storylines that define each tournament week.

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Firdows Matheen

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