The PGA Tour schedule is in the midst of a stretch that is narrower than the Strait of Hormuz.
This week’s Zurich Classic of New Orleans comes on the heels of the Masters and RBC Heritage, a signature event, and will be followed by two more signatures with limited fields of 72 — the newly created Cadillac Championship and the Truist Championship — and then another major, the PGA Championship. The rank and file will get an opposite field event, the OneFlight Myrtle Beach Classic, the week of the Truist to play for $4 million and 300 FedEx Cup points to the winner.
One event is not like the others and that is the Zurich, which has a glorified Korn Ferry Tour field outside of the well-compensated Zurich ambassadors — Ben Griffin, Billy Horschel, Shane Lowry and Sahith Theegala — because what star player is going to play for this week’s purse of $9.5 million during a six-week stretch when the rest are a minimum of $20 million and the winner gets 400 FedEx Cup points compared to 700 for a sig event and 750 for a major?
“Yeah, it's a busy stretch,” conceded Patrick Cantlay, a player director on the PGA Tour policy board and member of the Future Competitions Committee. “There's a lot of big tournaments throughout the year so it's no surprise that at one part of the year it's a little congested. Hopefully my game is rounding into form at a busy time, at an important time of the year.”
Asked if he will play them all, Cantlay answered, “I will, the five out of the six.”
The one left out? New Orleans, where he is a past champion and has enjoyed success with partner Xander Schauffele. Another past champion, Rory McIlroy, dropped the Zurich from his schedule this year, leaving his pal Lowry, who became one of the newest Zurich ambassadors, to team with Brooks Koepka this year in what may be one of the formidable duos if they can gel.
When Cantlay was asked if the FCC is going to try to limit this glut of signature events and majors from happening in the future as they remake the Tour schedule going forward, Cantlay demurred.
“I'm not sure where we're going to shake out on all that,” he said. “I'm not going to comment at this time on that.”
This should be a priority because it provides an unfair advantage to those who finished in the top 50 a year before and have access to all the big money events while the Korn Ferry Tour and Q-School grads as well as Nos. 51-100 largely sit on the sidelines or are reduced to playing down at the KFT.
This situation became magnified when the Tour added a ninth signature event at Trump Doral, which returns to the schedule next week, and seems destined to return to an earlier timeframe as part of the Florida Swing going forward. The cancellation of The Sentry returned the number of signatures to eight this season. Tour CEO Brian Rolapp said he’d like to have as many as 16 signature events in the future.
Zurich previously re-upped its sponsorship through 2030, so it likely isn’t going away, though a date change might be advantageous. When asked during a Zoom call ahead of the tournament on what he thought the future of the event might be, Griffin conceded it was a busy part of the schedule and tried to be as upbeat as possible.
“There’s a lot of exciting events around where it is. With certain top players creating a priority on playing signature events, it makes it hard from a strength of field but having the team event makes it unique,” Griffin said. “I just hope there are a lot of events in the future, I hope there are a lot of opportunities for players and as far as how it’s going to roll out, not really sure, but regardless as players we just have to continue to chase and continue to try to play our best and that includes the Zurich Classic.”
Even for the stars, this stretch is daunting. Scottie Scheffler told Golfweek he is strongly considering skipping the Truist Championship at Quail Hollow, where he won the PGA Championship a year ago. Scheffler has made it known that he doesn’t like playing signature events on grind-it-out courses the week before majors, and he faces the added burden of defending the week after the PGA at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson, his hometown event in Dallas, followed by the Charles Schwab Challenge in nearby Fort Worth. Another signature event, the Memorial, where he is the defending champion as well, comes next.
Those first-world problems don’t exist for the rank-and-file, who have to show up whenever they are eligible, but the scheduling needs smoothing out for them too. Route 66 is the only runway longer than this Aon Swing 5 stretch to Charlotte.
The idea of the Swing 5 is to give the hot hands not already in the signature events a chance to qualify and present the best limited-event fields. But for next week’s Cadillac Championship and Truist Championship thereafter, Chandler Blanchet, for one, still is feasting on finishing second at the Puerto Rico Open, an opposite-field event held nearly two months ago in early March.
Likewise, it is possible that a player hitting half the shots — not exclusively their own ball — at the Zurich Classic is going to get into two signature events to play for $40 million on their own ball. That doesn’t seem ideal. But to Andrew Novak, who partnered with Griffin for his maiden victory last year, the team event is a welcome break from a brutal stretch of the season.
“I cannot stress to you how nice it is going to be on Thursday to pick the ball up and let Ben finish out the hole for me," Novak said. "I’m being punched in the face repeatedly for a few weeks, so, it is going to be really nice to have the team event in there to change the pace up a little bit from what we’ve got going week in, week out."
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: PGA Tour schedule challenges players, raises questions at Zurich Classic