Justin Thomas during a practice round ahead of the 2024 Tour Championship. | Photo by Mike Mulholland/Getty Images
The introduction of the Aon Next 10 and Swing 5 amid the PGA Tour’s new Signature Events proved to be a massive success in year one.
ATLANTA — Throughout this past season, you may have noticed PGA Tour broadcasts highlighting the Aon Next 10 and Swing 5, which helped establish the 70-player fields at the lucrative Signature Events.
Aon provides analytic insight to help the PGA Tour and other companies make better decisions, so it makes sense that they helped create this initiative.
Unveiled in August 2023 as part of the tour’s 2024 schedule release, fans, pundits, and some players initially expressed confusion over the Aon Next 10 and Swing 5. Nobody knew how it would work without it being put into practice.
“I didn’t really know what to think of the Aon 5 and Aon 10 at the start of the year and if a lot of the players are going to benefit out of it, but I was a guy that benefitted a lot out of it,” explained South African Christiaan Bezuidenhout, who will make his Tour Championship debut this week.
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Christiaan Bezuidenhout plays his approach into the first hole during the opening round of the 2024 Tour Championship.
“I got off to a strong start at the beginning of the year with my runner-up finish at the American Express, and that put me into a great position to play my way into all the Signature Events for the rest of the year. It was nice to see the system that the PGA Tour put in place work. Luckily, I benefitted from that, and yeah, it’s been a strong season so far.”
The top 50 players from the 2023 FedEx Cup standings—or whoever qualified for the 2023 BMW Championship—earned direct entry into all eight Signature Events in 2024. But that left 20 places in these fields available to other players.
Enter the Aon Next 10 and Aon Swing 5 to help fill that void.
The Next 10 ensures that the best 10 players from the season gain entry into the Signature Event fields. It ranks the top 10 FedEx Cup points earners not otherwise exempt from these high-profile tournaments.
Meanwhile, the Swing 5 helps identify players with the best form. Two or three full-field events typically sit between Signature Events, and from those sets of tournaments, the five best players earn invites to the Signature Events via the Swing 5.
For instance, after the season-opening Sentry at Kapalua, the top five point-earners from the Sony Open in Hawaii, the American Express in Palm Springs, and the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines combined earned a spot at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am—the season’s second Signature Event. Bezuidenhout, Grayson Murray, Stephan Jaeger, Matthieu Pavon, and Kevin Yu made it to Pebble Beach this year via the Swing 5.
“The Swing 5 and Next 10 are data-driven inspirations from our players, and Aon played a big role in helping us analyze it, but fundamentally, those are both signifying this structure where you have the top stars, but you also have the guys that are the next version of the top stars, and it’s aspirational to try and get into these Signature Events,” explained Tyler Dennis, the Chief Competitions Officer for the PGA Tour.
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Ludvig Åberg makes his Tour Championship debut this week.
“The Aon Next 10 consists of guys like Ludvig Åberg. And then, the Swing 5 is fun because they are the guys who are hot. You can be a top player, and you can also be hot.”
Åberg has seen his stardom soar exponentially over the past year. He went from graduating from Texas Tech to playing on the Ryder Cup team to winning the RSM Classic last November, the final tournament of the FedEx Cup Fall.
The top-10 finishers from the FedEx Cup Fall, ranked 51st to 60th in the rankings, receive invites to the first two Signature Events of the season—a big deal for young players like Åberg.
“[The Aon Next 10 and Swing 5] was big because I wasn’t in the top 50 through [last year’s playoffs. I had a chance to play my way into the fall schedule, propelling me throughout the season. Suddenly, I got into Maui, and I got into the elevated events that I didn’t have a chance to play in before,” Åberg explained at the BMW Championship, where he finished two strokes behind Keegan Bradley in a tie for second.
“Then it spiraled from there. I was super fortunate to have those experiences, which is what’s so great about the fall season. Good golf is always going to get rewarded, and I was fortunate to be able to take advantage of that.”
Åberg went on to have a stellar season, finishing runner-up to Scottie Scheffler at Augusta National and recording seven other top-10 finishes. He finished atop the Next 10 rankings by nearly 500 points.
But another star player took advantage of the Next 10, finishing eighth in the Next 10. Justin Thomas, who had a poor 2023 by his standards, turned things around in 2024, mainly because of these opportunities.
“I think the fact that the guys in the top 50 have earned [spots in Signature Events] is great. Also, I felt a lot of pressure this year to play my way into those, but it kept me extremely motivated. I didn’t want to have to rely on exemptions. It was also weird and uncomfortable,” Thomas explained.
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Justin Thomas at the 2024 Tour Championship, his first start at East Lake in two years.
“They might be upset or not happy that they’re in them, but they have the same opportunity to play their way in just like myself and everybody else can [through the Aon Next 10]. That’s what we all know we signed up for in golf. You can go out and get it yourself. So I think that’s great.”
Thomas also applauded the PGA Tour’s efforts in establishing the Aon Next 10 and Swing 5.
“They did a pretty good job for a first go around,” Thomas added.
“As I said, it just allows guys that aren’t in the events to know where they stand, and they have the opportunity to play their way in these big events, and we want the best and hottest players in these fields.”
Remarkably, nine of the 30 players in this week’s Tour Championship field at East Lake qualified for Signature Events via the Next 10 and Swing 5.
The goal for every PGA Tour star is to make it to Atlanta for the finale, and to do so, you have to play well in the Signature Events.
“We’re really pleased with the impact we created in year one and genuinely excited to keep the momentum going of starting year two for next season,” explained Taylor Strick, the Head of Partnerships at Aon.
“This was a new opportunity that was created on the heels of all of the changes to the competitive structure that the tour made. So, there wasn’t really a playbook to follow. But on the flip side of that, I think what we found is there’s been an incredible opportunity to test and to learn and to continue to collaborate with our partners at the tour to find and tell and amplify these unique player stories that have been generated from both the Aon Next 10 and Swing 5.”
The 2025 PGA Tour season will be similar to the one that concludes this week in Atlanta. That includes the Aon Next 10 and Swing 5, which proved massively successful during their first go-around.
But now that we have lived through it, players, reporters, and fans alike will have a better understanding of how it all works next season.
Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Be sure to check out @_PlayingThrough for more golf coverage. You can follow him on Twitter @jack_milko as well.
