The PGA Tour’s West Coast Swing schedule will have a different rhythm in 2026, and there is one tournament that likely will benefit more than any other: the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines.
The dates for the start of the ’26 season have changed because New Year’s Day falls on a Thursday, so the season-opening Sentry in Maui will be played Jan. 8-11, followed by the Sony Open in Hawaii (Jan. 15-18), the American Express (Jan. 22-25), Farmers Insurance Open (Jan. 29-Feb.1)—and in a flip of two recent signature events, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (Feb. 12-15) will be played after the WM Phoenix Open, which will once again wrap up on Super Bowl Sunday (Feb. 5-8).
The schedule change for the Farmers comes at a time when the San Diego-based tournament is seeking a new title sponsor, the deal with Farmers expiring after the 2026 event.
In terms of the NFL schedule, the wildcard round of the playoffs will be during the Sentry, the divisional rounds during the Sony and the conference championship games in 2026 during the American Express. That is how the early part of the schedule played out for years, with Torrey Pines in the sweet spot of not being matched against football before the Farmers was moved in 2022 on the PGA Tour schedule to the week corresponding to the conference championship games, whose Sunday play keeps the tour from wanting to go up against it on network TV. (The entirety of the American Express in California desert is shown on Golf Channel.)
It was 2020 when the Farmers last had what might be considered a “normal” year, Marc Leishman, now a LIV Golf member, winning a few weeks before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 Farmers was played without fans on-site.
Locked into a Saturday finish for the last four years, Farmers host organization, Century Club of San Diego, and tournament director Marty Gorsich made the best of it and consistently reported good corporate and ticket sales results. But a Wednesday start might not have appealed to some players, and the tournament lost one day of weekend TV ratings on CBS at a time when viewership for the entire tour was seeing declines.
This season, as reported by Front Office Sports on Wednesday, linear viewership for the final round of most of the tour’s signature events has risen, with Pebble Beach up 47 percent to 3.3 million viewers, the Genesis Invitational up 6 percent (3.4 million) and Arnold Palmer Invitational up 22 percent (2.8 million). Farmers, however, experienced a decline for its final round on Saturday this year, with Harris English’s victory drawing 1.41 million viewers on CBS, down 11 percent from Matthieu Pavon’s win a year ago.
“In my time, we’ve had so many things to do … the pandemic, date shifts, title sponsor challenges, we just kind of stay steady,” Gorsich said on Wednesday. “Now we’re back on Sundays and so I’m telling our team, ‘Let’s go do a great job on Sundays.’ We know we did well on Saturday. We know we’ve done well on Sundays. For that team, that’s the focus in 2026.”
In terms of details about what ’26 will look like, Gorsich said there has been some delay in planning because his team helped stage the Genesis Invitational at Torrey Pines in February after the signature event had to be moved from Riviera Country Club because of the Los Angeles fires. Gorsch will meet with PGA Tour officials next week at headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., after the upcoming Players Championship.
In part because the Farmers’ date has been in close proximity to three $20 million signature events, Torrey Pines also has seen fewer high-profile players enter. Gorsich confirmed that there will be talks with the tour about the future stature of the San Diego event.
“Those are some of our questions,” he said. “We’re all waiting to see what the future of the PGA Tour will look like, so we haven’t gotten too far ahead on what this does or doesn’t mean for us. We know Torrey does well and gets a solid field, but there’s also an awareness out there that the tour wants the best players together on the best courses to give our fans a great show. We’ll have to see how we balance out in some of that.”
One other issue that still needs to be accounted for is the fate of the APGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Invitational. The event has been played since 2022 with its final round held on the Sunday after the Farmers on the Torrey Pines’ South Course and televised by Golf Channel, affording it national exposure with the broadcast.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
