What PGA Tour is doing to help boost Cognizant Classic field
Tom D'Angelo
With Cognizant signing on as the title sponsor of the former Honda Classic, the focus now can return to boosting the field.
With the PGA Tour's Championship Management division now running the event, it's in their best interest to attract more elite golfers than the tournament has seen in recent years.
The field has been embarrassingly bad lately, mainly because of the schedule and the tour elevating several events around Honda, giving players an easy excuse to skip the tournament held at PGA National.
But the tour tweaked the 2024 schedule and at least one of those golfers, and local residents, who has stayed away the past four years after playing in five straight, believes Cognizant will benefit.
"I think it'll help it," Justin Thomas said Sunday at the PNC Championship. "Everybody is just so different in how they break the schedule up and how much they're playing (early in the season).
"It's tough. But I do think it'll help the field, especially with how it's been the last couple of years."
Thomas cannot say now whether he will return, not knowing his exact schedule through February and March. Cognizant, which is scheduled for Feb. 29-March 3, is once again followed by the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the Players Championship and the Valspar Championship.
The 2023 field included four of the top 30 golfers in the world rankings at the time, its fewest in at least a decade. None in the top 10 played for the third consecutive year.
The main culprit was the schedule. It was difficult enough with Honda being the first stop of the Florida Swing and following the Phoenix Open and Genesis Invitational, but last year the tour elevated two events with purses of at least $20 million before and after Honda, giving every big-name golfer an excuse to skip the tournament.
As The Palm Beach Post reported following the 2023 event, the tour has loosened the 2024 schedule ahead of Cognizant, sticking the Mexico Open between the final event of the West Coast Swing (Genesis) and Cognizant.
Additionally, with complaints about the challenges of the Champion Course, the tour is working on ways to make the Jack Nicklaus redesigned course more friendly.
"The thing with that golf course, it's hard from 1 to 18," Charles Howell III once said. "There's no break."
The first adjustment is turning the 10th hole, which plays more than 500 yards, from a par 4 to a par 5, making the course a par 71. The hole played to an average of 0.161 over par last season and had 37 birdies compared with 93 bogeys and eight double bogeys or worse.
"I think from a tour standpoint, they are thinking through a lot about course design, difficulty of the course, all of those elements," Gaurav Chand, Cognizant's chief marketing officer, told The Palm Beach Post.
Still, none of these excuses had made it any easier for locals to digest when about one-third of the top 30 golfers in the world live in the area and very few recently have bothered to make the 20- to 30-minute drive to PGA National.
Thomas, who lives in Jupiter, understands when players decide to skip an event near their home.
"It's strange being home and being in work mode," Thomas said. "You wake up, you're used to kind of doing your thing. We're obviously practicing, but it's different than tournament weeks. And it's the best-case scenario because you're sleeping in your own bed. But it is weird.
"You've played your whole life where every single event you've played you're staying anywhere but your house. So when you're home, you just kind of disassociate the two. When you're home you're not in a competition so sometimes you're like, 'Wait, I have to wake up for a tee time tomorrow?' It's a strange thing."
Since 2012, three locals have won: Thomas (2018), Rickie Fowler (2017) and Rory McIlroy (2012).