Tiger Woods broke a 10-month silence on Tuesday morning at the Hero World Challenge with a ball blast.
On his annual pilgrimage to the dugout at the Hero World Challenge, Woods hinted that the PGA Tour was on the verge of changing its competitive schedule — potentially a land shift for professional golf’s biggest tour.
“We’re trying to figure out what’s the best schedule possible so we can create the best courses and have the most viewership and also the most fan involvement,” Woods said Tuesday, directly referring to the schedule changes that have been rumored for months. New PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp. “Looking at different start and end times, different trends throughout the year and what that might look like.”
Woods was speaking in the caged language of a seasoned professional, but the implication of these carefully chosen words was great. Tiger was hinting at something much bigger than a calendar rearrangement — he was advocating for a change in the way the PGA Tour sees itself.
Mantra after the shift? Rolapp told us at his opening press conference: Keep it simple, stupid.
“The sports business is not that complicated,” Rolapp said then. “You get the product right, you get the right partners, and your fans will reward you with their time.”
Woods’ prospect of a new tour schedule carries added weight as the golf world turns its gaze to 2026. The 15-time major champion is chairman of the PGA Tour’s so-called “Future Competitions Commission,” or FCC, a collection of players and influential sports business voices charged with creating a “optimal competitive model” for the tour under Rolapp.
For weeks, rumors have swirled around the committee’s findings, including some reports that the Tour may seek to create a shorter, more streamlined regular season, competing largely in the NFL offseason. These rumors were confirmed by a report from Golf Digest and comments from US Ryder Cupper Harris English, who suggested the new season could begin after the Super Bowl and end around Labor Day.
On Tuesday, Woods indicated that the Tour was indeed pursuing a truncated schedule starting possibly as soon as 2027. The new schedule, Woods said, is intended to simplify the PGA Tour for fans. It also features an obscure set of pillars: football season.
“That’s one of the reasons why we left the game in September and October and even early November when I was playing in my first championship tour,” Woods said, referring to the NFL. “There’s one thing with The Shield that’s there that’s impactful.”
Golf has long debated the merits of a fight with the world’s most profitable sports property. In 2006, Woods was among the players who spoke out aggressively against PGA Tour events on NFL weekends, arguing that golf deserved its place on the sports calendar (and, critically, its own offseason). In the years that followed, PGA Tour commissioners Tim Finchem and Jay Monahan challenged these wishes by expanding the PGA Tour schedule as part of a broader effort to maximize the value derived from the tour’s television rights deals. Those efforts worked, and the tournament grew into the tens of billions, but the schedule grew ever more bloated … and ever more confusing. Woods’ words from Doral in 2006 stuck.
“We have an 11-month season, and that’s too long. Woods said then. “I think we should end it with Labor Day. How can we compete against football? It’s not going to happen.”
Some pointers from a surprisingly astute Tiger Woods at Hero.
– Interesting to hear Tiger speak so candidly about the PGA Tour schedule changes. Hints that a shorter PGA Tour that avoids football could be coming in 2027. Lots of smoke here, but Tiger is the first…
— James Colgan (@jamescolgan26) December 2, 2025
Rolapp knows the importance of dominating the planet of the NFL better than most. He spent nearly three decades working in the league office under commissioner Roger Goodell, including more than a decade as the point person for the league’s media properties. He was hired as Tour CEO primarily for his skills in expanding the NFL’s media business through platforms such as Thursday Night Footballalthough it appears that he is now responsible for adopting this structural type shrinking rarely seen in today’s world of TV rights deals. In that effort, Rolapp’s NFL experience may not be of much help: The Shield hasn’t faced structural changes like the one Rolapp has at the plate since expanding to a 16-game regular season in 1978.
But there is one component of the old NFL playbook that should work in Rolapp’s favor on Tour. Under Goodell, Rolapp perfected the league’s strategy reach — or bringing the biggest games to the biggest stages where they can be seen by the most fans. In many ways, the ethos behind this NFL strategy was the same: simplicity.
“Well, it’s fan-based. We’re trying to give the fans the best product we can,” Woods said. “And if we’re able to give the fans the best product we can, I think we can make the players that have tournament equity, we can give them more of that.”
The PGA Tour calendar is an unusual beast by professional sports standards. Unlike most pro sports — where the regular season builds toward the biggest weeks of the year — golf’s biggest weeks occur in the middle of the regular season at major championships. The FedEx Cup Playoffs and Signature Events series were intended to untangle golf’s “camel” schedule by creating a more natural flow to the season and a dramatic, late-season conclusion, but the system always lacked coherence. The points system was difficult to understand, the play-offs featured no fewer than five different formats, and the sudden start of the ensuing “autumn session” cost the Tour much of the momentum it sought to build.
Last week, at an event hosted by CNBC, Rolapp promulgated the unifying theory behind any future PGA Tour changes: Not to make money or sign a bigger TV deal, but to create a competitive structure that was easy for ANYONE to understand.
“Part of the issue with professional golf is that it has grown as a series of events that happened on television,” Rolapp said. “However, how do you actually take those events, make them meaningful on their own, but put them together in a competitive model, including a season after season that everyone will understand whether you’re a golf fan or a sports fan.”
It’s a tricky needle to thread. Golf’s traditions are some of what makes the sport dear to its die-hards – and the calendar’s annual cadence is often cited by golfers as a benefit of tour life. Upending those traditions in favor of a slimmer, more elegant schedule could help attract a larger audience, but it could also alienate the Tour’s core fanbase, including some of its own members.
Five years ago, baseball faced a similar conundrum. Its games were slow, its visibility stale and old, and its rules outdated. A new commissioner, Rob Manfred, was hired to refresh the product. He prompted rule changes that enraged the fan base and threatened more than a century of tradition. After quite a few manuscripts, the changes were ratified.
But then a strange thing happened: baseball boomed. Match times were halved, stadium attendances increased and sports viewability metrics increased. These changes are still new and it’s too early to call them unmitigated successes, but overall they provide a blueprint for what kind of brave new world golf’s near future could be.
Woods was coy about whether any of the proposed Future Competition Committee changes might resonate with baseball, but a key member of Manfredi’s delegation serves alongside Tiger on the FCC: Former commissioner’s consultant Theo Epstein, who encouraged many of Manfred’s rule changes under the one-word ethic of “action.”
“We have some incredibly smart player directors, some independents and some leaders who have led change in other sports,” Woods said. “So trying to bring all of that together with Brian’s leadership and stewardship, that’s what we’re trying to implement all these different things.”
Of course, there is a financial incentive for simplicity in pro golf. Woods said he believed the ramifications of the potential changes could be “fantastic” for Tour players — and Rolapp is making his first impression with golf’s fan base (and his membership) on the bet that Woods is right.
But the big takeaway from Woods’ words Thursday morning was that he believes a “better” PGA Tour and a “richer” PGA Tour aren’t necessarily in conflict.
It’s been a long and complicated road to get here. But now the way forward is clear.
And, perhaps just as importantly, it is simple.
