BLAINE, Minn. — About an hour after he won the 3M Open on Sunday, a reporter asked Jackson Koivun an innocent question: What will you remember most from the weekend?
“Just that I’ll be forever indebted to the 3M Open for helping me get my first PGA Tour win,” he said.
It was a good answer by the 21-year-old, newly turned pro, but it’s also an ironic one.
It was a dream week for the 3M Open. World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler entered for the first time, ticket sales skyrocketed and then Scheffler and Koivun battled down the stretch. One of the game’s brightest young stars beat out its top performer, meaning the 3M Open would always hold a special place in his heart, no matter how many more wins he piles up.
Even those words — “forever indebted” — are music to a sponsor’s ears. Maybe Koivun will come back? Maybe Scottie will too?
But here’s the complicated part: they might not be allowed to.
Officially announced last month, the PGA Tour schedule will look drastically different in 2028, with the Tour essentially splitting into two different tracks. The top 130 or so players will compete on a Championship Series, with the next 150 or so on a Challenger Series.
If this is news to you, you can read all about how it works here, but there’s one important sentence worth pointing out: PGA Tour Championship Series members will not be eligible to play PGA Tour Challenger Series events.
That means someone like Scheffler, for example, who will be on the Championship Series, will not simply be able to add a post-Open Championship stop in Minnesota if the 3M Open is a part of the Challenger Series. Same goes for someone like Koivun, who seems destined to land on the top track. If the 3M Open isn’t on the top track and Koivun is, he won’t be able to come back and return the favor for the tournament where he got his first win.
Of course, this is all a moot point if the 3M Open were to land on the Championship Series. That may ultimately come down to 3M’s interest in footing a significantly costlier sponsorship price (and the Tour solidifying a spot for it in the schedule). Regardless, it’s a dilemma that will affect a handful of regular Tour stops.
“That is probably one of the stranger parts of the whole situation because most of the time guys go back to try to defend their titles,” Jordan Spieth said earlier this month from the John Deere Classic, a tournament in a similar situation. “It’s definitely something that’s almost like an unofficial job that you have in a way. I would say, for the most part, if you do win, you’re most likely not going to be back at a Track 2 event. If it was a Track 2 event the year before, you probably earned your way, maybe, on a Track 1.
“I don’t know what events are going to fall where. I think they’re still working on that. That would be probably the strangest part of the whole deal.”
The new Championship Series will have 23 to 24 tournaments. Four of those are the majors, another is the Players Championship and one more is either the Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup. Then there are at least two FedEx Cup Playoffs events.
That leaves 15 or so regular-season Championship Series events, and the Tour has already lined up 10 of them for 2028 (they’ve yet to be formally announced), many of which fans could easily predict: the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the Genesis Invitational, the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Memorial tournament. The other five will be filled by existing events or new (read: bigger) markets, like Boston, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The final few decisions likely lie in the difference between the purse sizes of Championship Series events ($20 million) and their Challenger alternatives ($4 million).
Hollis Cavner is the executive director of the 3M Open and, as the CEO of Pro Links Sports, is also involved in running other PGA Tour events. Few are more plugged in. At the 3M Open media day last month, Cavner told reporters 3M executives will have discussions with the Tour about the event’s future at the end of this season, adding “but it’s got to make business sense.”
The Tour plans to announce the full Championship Series schedule early next year, and players on both tracks will love schedule predictability. But what about schedule flexibility? It’s a double-edged sword.
Lucas Glover, the chairman of the Player Advisory Council, also talked about this issue while at the John Deere.
“People a lot smarter than me are making those decisions, but that was a huge, huge point of contention and discussion [with the new schedule], but it’s just going to have to be the way it is,” he said. “Change is hard, but it’s sometimes necessary.”
You can reach the author at joshua.berhow@golf.com.
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