This week's Cognizant Classic at PGA National features exactly one player ranked in the world's top 30. Ryan Gerard, at No. 28. That's it.
Three of the tournament's pre-event betting favorites — Jacob Bridgeman, Ben Griffin, and Adam Scott — all withdrew before tee-off. Brooks Koepka is the biggest name in the field, which says something about where this event sits in the Tour's pecking order. The purse is $9.6 million. The field is 123 players deep. And yet the star power is almost nonexistent.
This isn't an anomaly. It's the system working exactly as designed.
The Signature Event Squeeze
When the PGA Tour introduced Signature Events in 2024, the pitch was simple: concentrate the best players in fewer events with bigger purses and smaller fields, creating must-watch television. The concept made sense on paper. Give fans a dozen or so weekends per year where every marquee name is in the field, and viewership should follow.
Two years in, the experiment has produced a predictable side effect that anyone could have seen coming: the non-signature events have been hollowed out.
The 2026 schedule now features nine Signature Events, up from eight last year, with the Miami Championship at Trump National Doral joining the rotation. Add in four majors, and that's 13 weeks where the Tour's best players are required or incentivized to show up. For the remaining 20-plus regular events on the schedule, star appearances are voluntary — and increasingly rare.
The math doesn't work in favor of events like the Cognizant Classic. It's sandwiched between the Genesis Invitational — a Signature Event with a $20 million purse that just crowned Jacob Bridgeman as a first-time winner — and the upcoming signature-event stretch that dominates March and April. Why would a top player burn energy this week when the events that actually matter for their season are stacked ahead?
What Justin Thomas Gets Right
Justin Thomas, who still calls Palm Beach home and has history at PGA National, didn't sugarcoat the situation when asked about the Cognizant's field. "It's a bummer," he told reporters. "It's one of those events that has fallen at an unfortunate time in the schedule."
That's diplomatic, but the truth is harsher. The Cognizant hasn't "fallen" anywhere. It's been deliberately placed in the calendar as a regular-season event with no structural incentive for top players to attend. The purse, while generous by historical standards, is less than half of a Signature Event purse. The FedExCup points awarded to the winner are 500 instead of 700. And there's no mandatory participation requirement.
Thomas is pointing at a scheduling problem, but the real issue is a structural one. The Tour has created a caste system. There are events that matter and events that fill calendar space. The Cognizant, the CJ Cup Byron Nelson, the Charles Schwab Challenge — these tournaments have rich histories and passionate local fanbases, but they've been reduced to developmental stops on a circuit that increasingly revolves around a dozen premium weekends.
The Irony of the LIV Critique
Here's what makes this situation especially awkward for the PGA Tour: their loudest criticism of LIV Golf was always about the format. No cuts. Small fields. No real jeopardy. Exhibition-style events masquerading as competition.
And yet five of the nine Signature Events in 2026 have no cut. Fields are capped at 70–80 players. The format is eerily similar to what the Tour spent years criticizing.
Meanwhile, the regular events — the ones that still have 36-hole cuts and full fields of 120-plus players — are the ones losing their relevance. The tournaments that look most like "real" PGA Tour golf are the ones the Tour itself seems to be deprioritizing.
The PGA Tour spent years arguing that LIV was bad for the sport because it removed competitive stakes and siphoned star power away from established events. Two years into the Signature Event era, the Tour has accomplished something similar to its own non-signature schedule from within.
What This Means for the Rank and File
The players hurt most by this system aren't the ones withdrawing from the Cognizant Classic. They're the ones who need events like the Cognizant to exist in their current form — or better.
Consider the spring schedule. From April through early June, players outside the top 50 in FedExCup points face a nine-week stretch with just four full-field tournaments available to them. That's four chances to earn a paycheck, accumulate points, and keep their cards. Meanwhile, the top 50 are playing Signature Events with inflated purses and guaranteed paydays (no cuts, remember).
The Aon Swing 5 — a system that rewards hot streaks in non-signature events with a spot in the next Signature Event — is the Tour's attempt at creating a meritocratic bridge between the two tiers. This week, Michael Thorbjornsen, Nicolai Hojgaard, Haotong Li, Stephan Jaeger, and Kevin Roy sit atop those standings. But the incentive structure still says the same thing: non-signature events are a means to an end, not destinations themselves.
For a sport that has always marketed itself on the idea that anyone in the field can win on any given week, this is a philosophical problem. The PGA Tour built its brand on the notion that a Monday qualifier could beat the world's best over 72 holes. That story still happens occasionally, but the stage it happens on is getting smaller.
The Cognizant Deserves Better
PGA National's Champion Course is a legitimate test. The Bear Trap — holes 15 through 17 — is one of the most feared stretches in professional golf. The course has produced dramatic finishes and memorable collapses. It deserves a field worthy of its difficulty.
Instead, the tournament has become a scheduling casualty, a pitstop between events that the Tour's biggest names actually prioritize. The fact that this week's field has one top-30 player isn't a reflection of the venue or the tournament's organization. It's a reflection of the incentive structure the Tour has built.
Where Does This Go?
The PGA Tour has a few options, none of them simple. They could increase purses at non-signature events to make them more attractive. They could require top players to compete in a minimum number of regular events, the way the old mandatory start system worked. They could redistribute FedExCup points more evenly. Or they could acknowledge what the current system actually is — a tiered league with premier and secondary events — and restructure accordingly.
What they can't keep doing is pretending the regular schedule is fine. When a tournament at one of America's most iconic resort courses can only attract one top-30 player, something fundamental has shifted. The question isn't whether the Tour has a two-tier problem. The question is whether they're willing to fix it before events like the Cognizant Classic become unwatchable — or, worse, unnecessary.
