Transcript - Episode 16: PGA Tour 2026 Begins - Brooks Koepka Returns

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Now, here’s your host, Corey, with another episode of the Birdie Board Podcast.

Welcome to Episode 16 of the Birdie Board Podcast.

Believe it or not, we are about to talk about the start of the PGA golf season, and this one is exciting.

So, two things to look forward to: we have LIV golfers potentially rejoining the Tour, and we already have a canceled tournament for the year.

But before we actually get into some of those key headlines, I want to talk about something that really helped me personally understand the importance of every event, and why it’s not just a season of golf tournament after golf tournament, and how these all tie together. And the key is to realize these things called Signature Events.

So I think of every golf tournament in kind of three buckets. You have your lowest tier, these are just filler events. Then you have your next tier up, which is Signature Events, which is what I’m about to talk about. And then you have your top tier, which are the majors that we’re all familiar with.

So these Signature Events, there’s eight of them throughout the year outside of the majors. Three of them are player-led and they have cut lines, and then the other five do not have cut lines, which is something I think the competition of LIV Golf really has led into.

But the reason that we need to understand these Signature Events is because they place value on that bottom-tier level event that are just smaller golf events, because they lead into these Signature Events.

And what you’re going to see in this upcoming season is a lot of these lower events that your players typically skip probably aren’t going to be skipped as often, because they allow players to become eligible for these Signature Events. And these Signature Events have a lot more weight to them. Not only do they have bigger prize pools and money payouts, but they also have more FedEx Cup points available to the winners.

So to get into these Signature Events, there’s a whole set of criteria, and these criteria change kind of throughout the season. But I’m going to start with explaining just the base set, and then we’ll get into some of the dynamicness of them.

The simplest criteria is if you are in the top 50 of the FedEx Cup standings, you are automatically eligible for the Signature Event. So this is like the top 50 from the 2025 season at this point in time. Those are the people that are qualified for the Signature Events right off the bat.

Then you have this one thing called the Aon Next 10. Aon is just a company that is sponsoring this next eligibility criteria, but the Next 10 are the people who did not finish in the top 50. So there are spots 51 through 60 in the previous fall FedEx Cup points. So we can simply say the top 60 make it, but it’s key that that Next Aon Next 10, keep it in mind, because it might change, as we talk about some of the dynamicness that I alluded to.

Then we have the Aon Swing Five. These are the top five FedEx Cup point earners between Signature Events. So that’s going to matter more as we get into the season. Right now, that’s not really a criteria, because we haven’t had any non-signature events yet.

The fourth criteria is any current-year tournament winners are eligible for the Signature Events.

And then PGA criteria number five: PGA Tour members in the top 30 of the Official World Golf Ranking are automatically eligible for the Signature Events.

And then the last eligibility criteria that can get people in is sponsored exceptions. Each event has various levels of sponsored exceptions that allow them to pick and choose players to be allowed to play.

All right, so six different eligibility criteria lock on there, and it changes as we go through the season.

So at the start, the first Signature Event is the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

So the Next 10. Remember the Next 10 criteria is the people from spots 51 to 60. For this event, it’s still looking at the top 10 at 51 through 60 through the 2025 FedEx Fall rankings. So it’s not yet considering the rankings of 2026 yet, even though by the time we get to the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, we’ve had four events.

But since we’ve had four events, this is where the Swing Five comes in. So as a reminder, the Swing Five is saying these are the top five players between Signature Events.

The start of the year is the Sony Open in Hawaii. So this is a non-signature event. So you have this one, the following week you have American Express, the one after that you have Farmers Insurance Open, and then you have the Waste Management Phoenix Open.

So you have four non-signature events. The top five players from those four events that are not yet eligible will become eligible for the first Signature Event, AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

So that’s how this kind of works, and these change throughout the season.

So, for example, if we go to a later Signature Event, let’s say the Cadillac Championship on April 27, it is not looking at the Sony Open to determine that top five between Signature Events. So it’s looking at the Puerto Rico Open, Valspar Championship, Texas Children’s Hospital Open, Valero Texas Open, and the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. So it’s looking at a different set of non-signature events to determine those five people.

What’s really cool about this is it really incentivizes players to play in these non-signature events, in these non-majors.

You might not see a player as often like Scottie Scheffler unless he’s chasing some FedEx points, but you’re going to see a lot more of those top 25 players. And they’re not just going to be training in the off-season or training between majors. They’re going to be playing in these to make sure that they’re eligible for these Signature Events that have these bigger prize pools and these bigger FedEx Cup point availabilities.

So that’s really how I just want to lead off into this golf season, is understanding these Signature Events have a lot of weight, and the events leading up to these Signature Events way more too.

That makes it exciting because this week we have the Sony Open, which is our first non-signature event that has weight to it. And the reason it is is because it plays into the Aon top five, or what did I call it? Sorry. It’s the Swing Five. Sorry. The Swing Five, Aon Swing Five, which again is the top FedEx point earners between Signature Events.

So this event matters a lot, especially for golfers who as of today are not eligible for these Signature Events. This can really also be a kickoff to someone’s golf season.

It typically is not the first event of the year, and that gets us to our other point I mentioned earlier, The Sentry. The Sentry was a Signature Event in previous years, and it was actually canceled this year. So the first event that typically happens every year is canceled, which is why we don’t have our first event until this week.

The Sentry tournament was canceled because of drought-like issues. It’s typically in Hawaii. So they don’t typically have just straight-up droughts like you would see in California or something like that, but they have really strict rules around water usage and irrigation and things like that. And all those logistics pairing with things like Hawaiian rules and trying to find alternate venues, Maui water conservation limits, things like that, just all led into the PGA Tour deciding The Sentry was canceled.

Well, this is really interesting because usually The Sentry is used as more of a warm-up tournament. It’s a winners-only tournament with a no-cut type of vibe. So usually PGA players like to go into this century because it’s a lower-pressure tournament to kind of refine their skills.

We don’t have that anymore. We jump right into the Sony Open, which is your typical tournament. It has a cut line. It has four days. It is a more intense field.

And I think you start to see that because if you look at the players who decided to play in the Sony this year, we actually have some big names. We don’t have players yet like Rory McIlroy or Scottie Scheffler, but we do have bigger players than normal.

For example, we have Russell Henley, we have J.J. Spaun, we have Keegan Bradley, Collin Morikawa. We have some big names that are already playing in the very first tournament of the year.

And the question is, how are these players going to do without an event like The Sentry, because they’re jumping right into the action?

And I think it’s going to be really reflective of how their seasons are starting, and how reflective their off-season preparation was. Because I think it always catches me by surprise how early the golf season starts. I mean, we’re in the beginning of January still. The NFL playoffs are full steam. A lot of people’s minds are not in golf mode right now, especially with the NFL playoffs going on. So it’s always a surprise to me that this is the point that golf season starts.

And then by the time my mind starts to think about golf in this sort of way, and watching PGA matches, it’s late February, probably March, and I don’t realize how much I miss.

So this episode here that I’m doing is a really nice primer. Not for you to just start watching every tournament. It’s casual golf. Some people don’t even watch PGA. That’s fine. But this podcast serves as a nice primer to the season, and reminds you: yes, it’s January, but the golf season is about to start, and it’s playing some events that really do matter.

So this is kind of like the first month story arc of the PGA. And we’re talking January through March. We have the Hawaii opener, which is what we’ve been talking about, the Sony Open, then the American Express, and then we have the Farmers Insurance Open and the Waste Management Phoenix Open in early February. And we get to our first Signature Event, the AT&T Pebble Beach, on February 9th.

So we have this kind of arc over the course of like a month and a half that these players are going to start playing in these tournaments with the goal to play in that first Signature Event.

And it really defines early season, who might start breaking out. It definitely shows who’s going to be sharp early, who’s building that momentum in the beginning of the season. It’s going to be telling, especially when we look at the Swing Five rankings. Who was the best over the first non-signature events?

Now, they’re not going to be playing the top people all the time yet because we still don’t see all the players. So if we see some random player in the top five, you have to remember in the back of your head some of these players like Scottie and Rory aren’t even playing yet. So yes, you might have beat the field, but you haven’t beaten the best golfers in the world quite yet.

However, it is indicative. It does help you understand who might be the next people in the later parts of the season. That’s what’s really important about this beginning story arc, it starts to tell a story.

And one of the main stories that we have seen in the recent headlines is a return of a LIV golfer for the first time to the PGA Tour. Brooks Koepka was reinstated into the PGA Tour under really strict standards or really strict guidelines.

The PGA put out a program called the Returning Member Program. And what this is, they kind of wrote it in a way that made it seem like it was this broad program for LIV golfers to return back to Tour. But if you start getting into the weeds of it, you realize it’s really targeting just a certain set of players.

And the PGA put out this statement that basically outlined all the rules that they would need to follow in order to be a returning player. And here are some of them.

The first and the biggest is they have to forfeit their potential player equity. I forget the exact timeline of how long they have to forfeit it. I want to say it’s like five years. I’m looking to mine some notes and stuff. Yeah, five-year forfeiture of potential equity through the PGA Tour’s Player Equity Program.

So what this is basically saying is every year PGA players gain some equity inside of the PGA Tour. If you’re familiar with stocks or anything like that, it’s the same idea of owning a stock. Let’s say you have stock in Apple. If the Apple revenue goes up, your stock value is going to go up. You’re going to make more money.

So if they’re not even getting quote-unquote PGA stock or whatever that kind of structure is, they’re losing out on a lot of money. So the first cost of this is they are not allowed to get any player equity over the first five years.

The second is they have to make a $5 million charitable donation. And this is going to be a joint effort between the player returning and the PGA Tour to decide on who’s the recipient of this donation.

So they were honestly surprisingly very explicit. I think a lot of people, especially with how the PGA has acted through this whole LIV situation, expected them to be more vague. Like, here’s the returning program, we’re not going to get into the specifics of the numbers. But they actually stated that five years of player equity is likely to be $50 to $85 million for your top performers.

That’s crazy. That’s a lot of money. And for someone like Brooks, who typically is a strong golfer and might even return to his glory days a bit, that number is based off performance. So the better these players play, the more equity they’re going to get.

So on paper, it looks like, wow, they’re giving up $50 to $85 million over the next five years, plus $5 million in charitable donations.

But I want to remind you of a few things. And this is kind of financial terminology, the value of time.

So there were articles. Let’s start talking about Brooks Koepka now specifically, because he’s the only one that has taken on this return.

So Brooks Koepka got paid, we think, over $100 million on his contract. Now he’s cutting his contract a year short, but we can assume that he probably has already made over $75 million.

So we know that he signed for over $100 million because he alluded to it in a podcast interview type of thing with Jake Paul. He kind of was joking about it, saying it was over $100 million. So you think, that’s the end of his contract. You cut it down a little bit, he’s probably somewhere in the $75 to $85 million range. He’s already pocketed that.

So in finance, if you already have the money in your pocket, it’s actually worth more than the player equity that he might be losing out on.

So let’s say he does the best he can, and the PGA made it that he can lose $85 million. Let’s say that came true. So over the next five years, he’s lost $85 million in player equity.

For him, he’s already made probably over $75 to $80 million from LIV. And if he’s using a financial advisor, and has that invested, he’s probably going to make more in the end, even with this detour to LIV.

So what I think PGA probably knows, just because of the financial side of it, is this is more of a PR thing. Let’s throw out these crazy numbers. On paper it looks like, wow, he’s basically giving up how much he made through LIV.

But that’s not true because of the time aspect of earning money. If you earn money today, it’s worth a lot more than what you earn in five years.

And that’s exactly how Brooks Koepka is going to benefit. Their player equity is really based off performance too. So $85 million, they said it was the top end. That’s assuming Brooks Koepka is playing out of his mind for the next five years. That probably isn’t going to happen.

So they said $50 to $85. He’s probably losing close to $50. So you think, okay, he’s losing $50 there, he donated $5 million, so now he’s looking at making $75, $80, $90 million years ago at LIV, and losing out on $50 million in the future.

He’s probably still net positive over the course of his life. So why this seems like a huge hit to the returning players, at least for someone like Koepka, I don’t think it’s as big of a hit as what it looks like on paper. That’s just kind of my breakdown of the salary.

It is, I think, really exciting that Brooks Koepka is returning. We’ve seen this LIV experiment, and I like how it has forced the PGA to make changes and add things like Signature Events and different formats. But it is probably time, in my opinion, for these bigger LIV golfers to come back.

And I think the PGA sees that too, because like I said, the Returning Member Program is written in a broad way, but is very, very specific.

So they have criteria in the Returning Member Program. And it’s basically like they need to be a big-time winner over the last four years or something like that.

And here’s what the actual language is: it’s only open to golfers who have won a major or The Players Championship since 2022.

So there’s only so many people who fit that criteria. And when you look at it, it names four specific people: Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and Cameron Smith.

So if they put together this whole program, they might as well have just said, this is for those four people. But in reality, they kept it more broad.

There is a little dilemma. They have a deadline for these players to apply by February 2nd.

So we already saw Brooks Koepka start the Returning Member Program. So now the question is, are Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, or Cameron Smith going to follow suit?

There have been tweets by Bryson DeChambeau about him saying LIV Golf isn’t where it’s at. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw one more person join. It would be cool to see all four of them join. But if I had to pick, I would like to see Bryson DeChambeau return back. I think that would be really good for the PGA golf game. He’s probably been one of the better, if not the best golfer after leaving the PGA Tour.

So there’s a lot at stake here, and a lot to keep an eye on in these first three weeks of the PGA Tour season.

We have lower events that really lead into these Signature Events, plus we have the storyline of LIV golfers now finally returning to the PGA. It’s a really exciting season and something you guys can really start to keep up with as we kick things off.

So here’s a 2026 map to start to look forward to for the season. This is all the majors plus The Players, and big non-major events like that.

So if you’re not familiar, golf is unlike baseball or football where there’s one key event at the end of the year. Golf has key events throughout the year, and these are called majors. These are four different tournaments that have the most importance on a golfer’s career.

The goal is to win as many majors as you can if you’re a professional golfer. There are obviously other goals you want, but that’s your primary goal. A lot of golfers are judged based off how many majors they have won.

What’s cool with how things are structured right now is there’s this tournament called The Players Championship, and a lot of times this is deemed as the fifth major. This happens in the beginning-ish of March, and it’s a huge tournament that gets your top players together, and it’s really like the first major pressure checkpoint of the year.

There’s only like a month until the first true major, so it’s a great test of players’ ability and readiness before they get into the majors in the month ahead. So it’s really telling, and something we can look forward to.

So we’ve talked about some of the Signature Events. We have a few Signature Events before The Players Championship, but all of this is part of the first arc. How is all the preparation happening between this week and The Players Championship? Who’s going to be ready for the first major, which is The Masters in the beginning of April?

This is your first legacy checkpoint. It starts defining who’s going to be the best players of the year, who’s going to be surprising, things like that.

And not too long after, about a month, you have the PGA Championship at Aronimink.

This one’s cool because Aronimink is probably only 20 minutes from me. I used to live five minutes away from Aronimink, so it’s cool that it’s coming back to the Philadelphia area.

It is mid-season. It’s May. It’s beautiful that time of year. The only thing I would say is May does bring a lot of rain, but it’s cool northeast energy.

And it answers the question: who is going to stay in power across these months of majors?

Because The Masters defines, okay, who’s stepping up this season? Who are the top golfers this season? We’ve had enough of the season from January to April.

Now we get into the PGA Championship. Okay, who’s going to continue to dominate? Who is the top golfer? It’s not who looks like they’re going to be the top golfers.

Then that continues on to the U.S. Open, the third major, in June. At that point we’ve crossed the halfway point. We start seeing who is persistent, who is consistent, who has the legs to be the best golfers of the season.

We start seeing the FedEx Cup standings really shape out, and we see who might be the best golfer by the end of the year. We have a lot more questions answered by then.

And then the last major of the year is The Open Championship. This always tests players’ games in a different way. It’s over in Europe. We get very different golf courses. It’s in July, which sometimes has warm weather or sometimes crazy weather. A lot of wind, things like that.

It tests, at that point, after the first three majors, who is the best golfer for the season, who’s inconsistent, and who is the most adaptable.

They’re traveling far, different conditions, different environment. If they can show they’re still playing well over there, it shapes the full picture of who’s going to be a strong golfer in the 2026 season.

So even though we lost our usual opening, we have one coming up. Watch it if you have time. Keep up with the highlights. Understand the meaning of this event.

Even if you don’t watch it, just see the results. It’s going to be telling.

It’s going to start shaping: who are the top five golfers of these first four events? Who’s going to make the first Signature Event?

When do we see Brooks? Right now, I believe Brooks is set to come back at the Farmers Insurance Open, end of January. So we only have a couple weeks until Brooks comes back.

I think that same tournament is when Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler come back. So we are ramping up here.

We’re going to see more and more big names. We’ve already started to see bigger names than normal in this first tournament. We’re going to see even more in the next tournament. Then we’re going to see a ton in the Farmers and Waste Management, and then we have our first Signature Event that has a ton of money and a ton of FedEx points up for grabs, which we’ll probably see a normal set of players in that tournament.

So definitely keep your eye out this season. It’s exciting that it’s starting. I can’t believe it’s already here. It seems like only a couple months since the golf season ended.

We still have a lot of time until we’re playing golf, most likely, unless you’re in a warm climate.

So enjoy this offseason. Enjoy sitting back watching golf. Take it as a learning experience. Start picturing things. The mental side of golf is huge, as you all know.

So even watching golf or just keeping up with things will be really good.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Birdie Board Podcast. Thanks for listening.

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