Two of Brooks Koepka\u2019s peers heralded his return this week as a significant victory for the PGA Tour.<\/p>\n
Speaking after their TGL match on Monday, both Rory McIlroy and Keegan Bradley said that LIV\u2019s loss was the Tour\u2019s gain after the five-time major winner opted out of his LIV contract early and worked out a deal to become the first reverse defector.<\/p>\n
Koepka is playing his first Tour event since 2022 this week at the Farmers Insurance Open.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it says more about Brooks than anything else,\u201d McIlroy told reporters. \u201cHe obviously is a very competitive person and wants to compete at the highest level. I think he made the decision that he thought competing at the highest level meant coming back to the PGA Tour.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve seen others say this recently; Patrick Reed said it in Dubai last week. It seems like some of those guys are maybe starting to realize that they\u2019re not getting everything that they wanted out of going over there, and that\u2019s obviously a great thing for the PGA Tour.\u201d<\/p>\n
McIlroy was referring to Reed\u2019s eyebrow-raising comments Sunday in Dubai when he revealed that he was a free agent for the 2026 season and had not yet signed his LIV contract. Reed, who was among the initial wave to leave the Tour in 2022, said that he expects to tee it up in Saudi Arabia next week but that nothing had been finalized at that point. Now up to No. 29 in the world after the win in Dubai, Reed said it was possible that he could continue to play on the DP World Tour and earn his way back to the PGA Tour \u2013 which he described as the \u201cbest tour in the world\u201d earlier in the week \u2013 if he remained among the top 10 in the season-ending Race to Dubai standings.<\/p>\n
To welcome back Koepka, the Tour established the Returning Member Program that outlined a pathway for any player who had won a major or Players title since 2022 and had been off the Tour for at least two years. The eligible players were Koepka, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau and Cam Smith, with the Tour instituting a Feb. 2 deadline to pick sides.<\/p>\n
As part of his terms, Koepka will need to qualify for any signature events this season and will not be eligible to receive any Tour equity shares for five years.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s just an unbelievably great thing that Brooks is coming back,\u201d said Bradley, the 2025 U.S. Ryder Cup captain. \u201cWhen I heard the news, I was thrilled. Brooks is an unbelievable competitor and somebody that really helps the PGA Tour. I\u2019m nothing but very happy \u2013 happy for him, happy for the Tour and another guy that I think can help the Tour get to another place. I\u2019m really happy for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Returning Member Program is just one way that the Tour is beginning to change under its new leadership with CEO Brian Rolapp. McIlroy, who hasn\u2019t played an official Tour event since last August at the Tour Championship, is expected to make his 2026 Tour debut in two weeks when he defends his title at Pebble Beach.<\/p>\n
On Monday night, McIlroy was asked about some of the rumored changes to the Tour, which could include a dramatic shortening of the schedule to satisfy one of Rolapp\u2019s core tenets of \u201cscarcity.\u201d Rolapp has created a future competition committee, headed by Tiger Woods, to look at the schedule model and product.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve all heard the rumblings without really knowing what\u2019s been said in those rooms and what they\u2019re thinking of,\u201d McIlroy said, \u201cbut obviously I think we\u2019ve all heard starting maybe after the Super Bowl and then going through the end of August before the football season starts again. That seems very condensed to me. Seems like a lot of golf in a pretty short amount of time, depending on how many events they want to play.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut that does open up an opportunity for the other five months of the year around the world. I\u2019m a DP World Tour member, a very proud one, and I think that opens an opportunity for them to showcase some of their biggest events in that time of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two of Brooks Koepka\u2019s peers heralded his return this week as a significant victory for the PGA Tour.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-433250","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}