PGA Tour Championship switches to match play starting in 2028

For as long as anyone's followed the FedEx Cup era, the Tour Championship has been a stroke-play grind at East Lake with a staggered-scoring gimmick nobody outside the Tour ever fully loved. That changes in 2028. The Tour confirmed a complete overhaul of its postseason, and the headline is match play deciding the season's champion for the first time ever.

Fore Play

@ForePlayPod

It’s official — we’re getting a MATCH PLAY Tour Championship starting in 2028. @reeses

The new setup runs 3 weeks total. Week 1 is a round-robin group stage: 32 players split into 8 groups of 4, with the top 2 from each group punching through. Week 2 trims the field to 16 for a 4-round match play bracket, with the 2 undefeated players left standing squaring off for the title. It's the first time match play has crowned a Tour champion, and the first time the format has shown up on Tour at all since 2023.

Fore Play

@ForePlayPod

An explainer of the full new format:

The venues aren't locked in as one fixed home the way East Lake has been. The Tour says 2 rotating courses will host the event going forward, letting historic layouts get a crack at hosting the finale instead of the same track every September. That's a real shift for a sport that's leaned hard on tradition and fixed sites for its biggest weeks.

Tiger Woods has been part of the Tour's Player Advisory and policy conversations shaping this stuff for a while now, and he showed up to weigh in publicly once the format went official. Getting Tiger's name attached to a structural overhaul like this carries weight with the playing membership in a way a press release alone never will.

Fore Play

@ForePlayPod

Tiger weighs in on the new match play Tour Championship format for 2028 ⤵️

Match play at the Tour level has always been a bit of a lightning rod — great TV in theory, brutal for stars getting bounced early in practice, which is exactly why the WGC-Dell version got shelved after 2023. Building it into the season-ending event instead of a standalone midseason stop is the Tour's bet that stakes fix the format's biggest flaw. Whether golf fans actually want their $25 million FedEx Cup decided by 1v1 duels instead of a leaderboard chase is the argument that's going to run for the next 2 years.