The TOUR Championship has never stayed the same for long. The event has cycled through venues since its early years, from Harbor Town to Pinehurst No. 2 to Southern Hills before settling at Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club in 2004. It even ran a ‘starting strokes’ format from 2019 to 2024, where FedEx Cup leaders began the week with a stroke advantage. The organization scrapped it in 2025 for a clean stroke play reset because of fan and player feedback. Now, just as fans adjusted, the PGA Tour is preparing for its biggest shakeup yet, with the season finale set to look completely different by 2028.

On August 25, the PGA Tour’s official X account shared a video of a hand-drawn breakdown by artist Sportsball, known for his quick explanations, to explain these changes. The X account captioned it, “Breaking down how the @Tour Championship is changing in 2028 with @Sportsball.”

Quintessential to the artist’s style, the video shows him sketching frame by frame, walking through the new system with color diagrams and stick figure golfers.

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The pretext for these changes is the PGA Tour’s two-tiered system. As reported previously, the tour will split into two concurrent tracks: the Championship Series, featuring 120 top golfers each week, and the Challenger Series, a 144-player developmental tour running alongside it. Every Championship Series event awards points, and players climb and slide through the rankings all year.

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As reported by Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter, at season’s end, the top 90 in points will advance to the “Championship Series Finale.” The source believes this will be the current BMW Championship, which will remain a standard August stroke-play event. It will see two winners: a tournament winner and a season-long points winner.

From there onwards, the format will shift dramatically. The top 32 players in season-long points advance to the reimagined two-week Tour Championship. Sportsball compared it directly to the World Cup. Those 32 split into eight groups of four, playing one head-to-head match per day. The top two from each group will move on to the second week to play another course. This is where 16 players battle through bracket-style match play until one golfer stands undefeated as the TOUR champion.

Notably, as the video explained, the effect will go beyond the format itself. Because match play requires a smaller field than a full-fledged play bracket, the Tour Championship will no longer restrict itself to courses built for field sizes and traditional setups. Naturally, that opens the door for the event to rotate through top-tier courses that could previously never host it. Simply put, it could pull fans physically closer to the action than ever before.

Moreover, SPJ adds a financial and logistical detail that the tour hasn’t confirmed publicly. Rather than East Lake’s current three sponsors, Coca-Cola, Southern Company, and Accenture, which all expire after 2027, the tour is reportedly seeking four to five new sponsors at $10 to $15 million apiece for the revamped postseason.

Now, amid two series overhauls, the Tour Championship awaits its final form in 2028. Golf fans won’t have to wait long to see if 2028 is the one that sticks.