The 2026 Bank of Utah Championship runs Thursday, October 1 through Sunday, October 4 at Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah, the PGA Tour's only stop in the state and the strangest piece of ground on the schedule. It is the third playing of a FedExCup Fall event routed through a field of black volcanic rock under the red cliffs of Greater Zion, at 3,100 feet of elevation, on the last golf course Tom Weiskopf ever designed. Here is the full preview: who is in the field and when that list actually closes, how to watch, what this fall decides, what the lava and the thin air reward, and where the community board stands.
Who is in the field at the 2026 Bank of Utah Championship
Be straight about this up front, because it is the question most people arrive with. The 2026 field is not confirmed, and exactly one player has been publicly announced. As of Tuesday, September 22, the tournament's own player-field page reads "Available Soon," the PGA Tour's 2026 field page lists no players, and daily pairings are marked "Available 9/30." Any complete field list circulating this week is a projection, not a roster. What follows is the confirmed name, the players with a standing exemption to use, and the group the standings say needs this week most.
The one confirmed commitment
Bowen Mauss has a sponsor exemption, announced in July. He won the 2026 Utah State Amateur, he is a sophomore at Arizona State, and this will be his second appearance in this event. That is the full list of publicly announced 2026 commitments.
Worth knowing: in both 2024 and 2025 the tournament announced a batch of four sponsor exemptions for Utah natives roughly one to two weeks before the event. If that pattern holds, another local announcement should land in the next several days.
The past champions with an exemption in hand
Michael Brennan is the defending champion. He won here in October 2025 on a sponsor's invitation, shooting 262 for 22 under and beating Rico Hoey by four, in his third career PGA Tour start and his first as a professional. That made him the first player since Jim Benepe at the 1988 Western Open to win in his first professional start on Tour. The win carried a two-year exemption, so he can play this week if he wants it, but no source has confirmed he has committed.
Matt McCarty won the inaugural edition in 2024, when the event was still the Black Desert Championship, posting 261 for 23 under and winning by three over Stephan Jäger. That was the first PGA Tour tournament played in Utah in more than 60 years and McCarty's first Tour title. Both champions in this event's short history were maiden Tour winners.
The players the standings say need this week
This is the most reliable way to read a fall field before it posts. The FedExCup Fall decides 2027 cards, and after the Biltmore Championship Asheville the top-100 line runs straight through a set of very recognizable names. Tony Finau sits 100th and holds the last fully exempt card. Three points behind the line, Billy Horschel is 101st, having dropped out of the top 100 during Biltmore week. Brooks Koepka is 98th, Christiaan Bezuidenhout 99th and Max Greyserman 97th, all of them inside by a margin that a single bad fall week erases.
Below the line, Lucas Glover is 103rd, Seamus Power 104th, Emiliano Grillo 112th and Rico Hoey 114th. Hoey is the one to circle for this specific week: he finished second here last year at 18 under and he is now 14 spots outside a card with seven events left. That is the clearest overlap on the schedule between a player who has proven he can score on this golf course and a player who cannot afford to skip it.
At the other end, Nos. 51 to 60 are playing for signature-event access rather than survival, a group currently led by Keith Mitchell, Jordan Spieth, Max Homa, Pierceson Coody and Harris English. None of them are confirmed here either, but that is the other bloc with a concrete reason to add a fall start.
Commitments close at 5 p.m. ET on the Friday before tournament week, which works out to Friday, September 25 for this event. That date comes from the Tour's own commitment rule rather than from a published deadline for this tournament, so treat it as the rule applied rather than an announcement.
On size: the tournament puts the 2026 field at 120 professionals, down from the 132 who played in 2025. The Tour cut its maximum full-field size from 156 to 144 for this season and runs some events at 120 or 132, so 120 is consistent with the new policy rather than a typo. It is still a full field with a 36-hole cut.
Quick comparison: what to track at Black Desert
| Storyline | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Bowen Mauss | The only announced 2026 commitment. Sponsor exemption, 2026 Utah State Amateur champion, Arizona State sophomore |
| Michael Brennan | Defending champion at 22 under, the first player since 1988 to win in his first start as a professional |
| Matt McCarty | 2024 champion here at 23 under, back when the event was the Black Desert Championship |
| Rico Hoey | Runner-up here last year at 18 under, now 114th in FedExCup Fall points and outside a card |
| Tony Finau at No. 100 | Holds the last fully exempt card. Billy Horschel is 101st, Brooks Koepka 98th |
| The lava field | The primary hazard is volcanic rock, not water or rough, and it plays as an unplayable lie rather than a penalty area |
Event: 2026 Bank of Utah Championship, PGA Tour FedExCup Fall, $6 million purse
Dates: Thursday, October 1 to Sunday, October 4, 2026
Venue: Black Desert Golf Course, Black Desert Resort, Ivins, Utah (PGA Tour setup: par 71, 7,421 yards, 3,100 feet of elevation)
Watch: Golf Channel is the television home, with streaming on PGA Tour Live. Round-by-round windows had not been published at the time of writing
Field: 120 players, not yet announced. Commitments close 5 p.m. ET Friday, September 25. Pairings post September 30
Defending champion: Michael Brennan, 262 (22 under), by four shots
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How to watch the 2026 Bank of Utah Championship
All four competition rounds run Thursday, October 1 through Sunday, October 4 at Black Desert Resort in Ivins, about 20 minutes west of St. George in the southwest corner of Utah. Golf Channel is the television home for the week, as it was for both previous editions, with streaming coverage on PGA Tour Live. There is no network broadcast window for this event; the 2025 edition was Golf Channel only.
The 2026 round-by-round windows have not been published. Television listings currently carry the event for Thursday, Friday and Saturday with every time marked as to be determined, and no Sunday entry yet, so no windows are quoted here as fact. For reference, the 2025 edition ran 5 to 8 p.m. ET Thursday and Friday and 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. ET Saturday and Sunday, with PGA Tour Live streaming from 9:45 a.m. ET on the first two days. Do not copy those forward: 2026 sits three weeks earlier on the calendar, which changes the daylight math.
One thing to get right before you set an alarm: Ivins is on Mountain time, which is two hours behind Eastern, one behind Central and one ahead of Pacific. The golf runs late in the Eastern day here, which is why the fall desert swing tends to get an evening window on the East Coast. A 5 p.m. ET window is 4 p.m. CT, 3 p.m. MT local and 2 p.m. PT.
Tournament overview: what the FedExCup Fall actually decides
The Bank of Utah Championship is the second of eight FedExCup Fall events in 2026, a run that opened last week in Asheville and closes with the RSM Classic at Sea Island in late November. The purse is $6 million and the winner takes 500 FedExCup points with the trophy.
The stakes give this stretch its edge, and the numbers moved for 2026. Exempt status now goes to the top 100 of the final points list rather than the top 125, the biggest eligibility change in decades. Nos. 101 through 150 get conditional status in tiers, which is a materially worse job: you get starts when a field does not fill, not when you plan a season. Anyone who finished inside the top 50 after the Tour Championship is already locked in and does not accrue fall points, while Nos. 51 to 60 play into two signature events next season through the Aon Next 10.
What a win is worth has changed too. The champion gets a two-year exemption, a start in the Sentry and the Players Championship, and a spot in the 2027 PGA Championship. What it no longer gets is the Masters: Augusta dropped PGA Tour fall winners from its qualifying criteria effective the 2026 tournament, which removed the biggest carrot that used to hang over these eight weeks. What is left is a field split between players chasing access and players chasing a livelihood, and that is the best explanation for why the fall keeps producing first-time winners at long prices. This event has done it in both of its playings.
Last week set the tone. Jacob Bridgeman closed the Biltmore Championship with a bogey-free 61 from five back to win at 26 under, two clear of Ben James, who also shot 61 on Sunday. A 26-under winning score in the fall opener is a reminder that these are not defensive golf courses.
The course: Weiskopf's last design, routed through a lava field
Black Desert Golf Course opened its full 18 holes in May 2023 and is the last of the 73 courses Tom Weiskopf designed, completed by Phil Smith after Weiskopf's death in August 2022. Smith has called it the most difficult project of his career. The PGA Tour setup is a par 71 at 7,421 yards, which is a conversion of the resort's par 72 card with added length, so the number on the members' scorecard will not match the one on the telecast.
The lava is not decoration. It is the hazard, in place of the water and heavy rough that defend most Tour venues, and it behaves differently from either. Black lava lines nearly every fairway and shapes the topography, with outcroppings creating blind sightlines on holes 2, 4, 5, 7, 11 and 14. A ball that finds it is effectively lost, because the rock is sharp, uneven and close to solid. Rules-wise it is not a penalty area: players take an unplayable lie and drop within two club-lengths, which is exactly how McCarty saved bogey on the 10th in the third round of his winning week.
The volume is the statistic worth keeping. The 2024 inaugural produced 154 lava-or-lost-ball rulings across the first three rounds alone, with the final round still uncounted. For scale, the Tour said the entire 2024 Valero Texas Open produced 60 rulings in total.
The other defining number is width. The fairways average just 30 yards across, which the PGA Tour called the 12th-narrowest on Tour. Weiskopf believed in giving players options rather than one correct answer, so the corridors look wide open, but the landing areas are tight and the penalty for missing them is absolute rather than graduated. Generous sightlines and an unforgiving miss is the personality of the place.
The greens are bentgrass and the complexes are a set of homages rather than a uniform family. The 198-yard par-3 third copies Riviera's sixth, bunker cut through the middle of the green and all. The par-5 13th green is modeled on Pebble Beach's 14th. The par-3 17th is a spin-off of Royal Troon's Postage Stamp. Holes 2 and 8 share a double green at the property's high point, and there are two drivable par 4s, the 320-yard fifth and the 322-yard 14th, the latter blind down the right behind a lava mound.
Then there is the air. At 3,100 feet the ball carries meaningfully farther than at sea level, and all three par 5s sit between 587 and 595 yards, which puts every one in range. Last year Brennan hit a drive that rolled out 411 yards on the 12th and drove the 322-yard 14th green with a 3-wood on his way to the title.
What actually wins at Black Desert Resort
Two playings is a thin sample but it is not nothing, and the winning scores are almost identical: 23 under in 2024, 22 under in 2025, with Adam Svensson opening the inaugural week with an 11-under 60. This is a scoring golf course, and anyone waiting for the desert and the altitude to defend par has been wrong twice.
What separates a winner from the rest of a birdie week is not distance, even though the altitude hands everyone distance. It is control. The categories the PGA Tour itself points at for this venue are strokes gained off the tee and on approach, proximity from 175 to 200 yards, putting on bentgrass, birdie-or-better gained, and scoring on par 5s in the 550-to-600-yard range. The profile falls out of that list: a player who finds 30-yard fairways, controls his distance in thin air where every club flies a number other than the one on the sole, and converts three reachable par 5s.
Thin air gives the whole field extra carry, which means extra carry stops being an advantage. What is scarce here is knowing exactly how far the ball is going and keeping it on grass. This is an accuracy week dressed up as a bomber's paradise.
Bank of Utah Championship 2026 odds: where the community board stands
Straight with you. As of Tuesday, September 22, the BettorEdge community board has the Bank of Utah Championship listed with its tournament winner market open and active, and zero live two-sided prices posted on it. Not a thin board, an empty one. The same is true across every PGA event on the board right now.
That is what you would expect, and it is a feature of a peer-to-peer market rather than a fault. A community board is other people's money. Nobody posts an outright price on a 120-player field nine days out when the field itself does not exist yet, because there is nothing to price. Commitments close September 25 and pairings post September 30, and that is the window when liquidity on a fall event typically arrives. Rather than dress a placeholder up as a real number, no odds are quoted here.
What is worth doing now is setting the expectation for what a fair number looks like when the board fills in. In a full-field fall event with no superstar in it, even the strongest name is rarely better than an 8 to 10 percent shot to win, which is roughly +900 to +1150, and a second-tier name is usually a 3 to 5 percent proposition, or about +1900 to +3200. In a 120-player field where nobody is dominant, the average entrant is a 0.8 percent shot. Anything implying much more than 12 percent here has run ahead of reality, whoever is attached to it. Run every number that posts through the implied probability calculator, and keep the scale in mind: a +550 favorite is claiming a roughly 15 percent chance to beat everyone else in the building.
Where the value sits
The BettorEdge read on this week, with no prices to point at, is that the course profile and the market's instincts pull in opposite directions, and that gap is the whole opportunity.
The market will price distance. The course pays accuracy. Altitude stories write themselves, and a 411-yard drive is the clip that travels. But the fairways are 30 yards wide, the miss is unplayable rock, and the stat profile the Tour associates with this venue runs through approach play and proximity from 175 to 200 yards rather than raw driving distance. When the board posts, the bombers are the likeliest group to be shorter than they deserve to be.
The card bubble has the strongest incentive on the schedule. With exempt status cut from the top 125 to the top 100, the players sitting between roughly 95th and 125th are in a genuinely worse spot than the same names would have been a year ago, and there are only seven events left to fix it. Rico Hoey is the cleanest example: second here last year, 114th now. That combination of proven course scoring and real urgency is rare, and it is the kind of thing a board assembled off season-long form tends to underprice.
Course history is unusually valuable here. Brennan and McCarty are the only two players who have solved this golf course under tournament conditions, at a venue where two playings of shot data exist for anybody. Course history is normally an overrated input. At a three-year-old course where every model is working from almost nothing, it is one of the few genuine edges available, and it is more likely to be underweighted than overbought. The golf outright betting guide covers why a 3 percent chance and a 3 percent price are not the same thing.
Back the Bank of Utah Championship on BettorEdge
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Beyond the outright: cut and matchup angles
On a full-field event, the outright is the fun bet and the smaller markets are usually the sharper one. These events cut to the top 65 and ties after Friday, and a make-the-cut ticket asks a much simpler question than a win ticket: is this player good enough right now to shoot two competent rounds?
At Black Desert that question has an unusually clean answer, because the course punishes one specific mistake. Two rounds without a lava ball is a survivable week, and one unplayable off a tee can cost a shot and a half and move a player from inside the number to outside it. The make-the-cut market here rewards the accurate driver over the long one more than the outright market does, and it is where the 30-yard-fairway statistic is priced most directly. The make the cut betting guide walks through how those markets are built.
Head-to-head matchups are the other clean angle, and a venue with only two years of shot data suits them better than outrights, because a matchup only asks which of two players is better this week rather than who beats the other 119. The golf matchup betting guide and the top 5 and top 10 finish guide cover the structure of both, and you can follow the week's prices and the rest of the fall on the BettorEdge golf hub.
Tools to check before you back a pick
Know the math before locking anything in. Turn a price into a true win probability with the implied probability calculator, strip the built-in margin out of any board with the no-vig calculator, and size your payout with the betting calculator.
Bank of Utah Championship 2026 FAQ
Who is in the field at the Bank of Utah Championship?
The 2026 field is not final, and Bowen Mauss, the 2026 Utah State Amateur champion, is the only player publicly announced, on a sponsor exemption. The tournament's player-field page still read "Available Soon" as of Tuesday, September 22, and the PGA Tour's 2026 field page listed no names. Defending champion Michael Brennan and 2024 champion Matt McCarty both hold winner's exemptions they can use but neither has been confirmed. The 120-player field posts once commitments close, and daily pairings are due September 30.
When is the 2026 Bank of Utah Championship and how can I watch it?
The 2026 Bank of Utah Championship runs Thursday, October 1 through Sunday, October 4, 2026 at Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah, with television coverage on Golf Channel and streaming on PGA Tour Live. Round-by-round start and finish times had not been published at the time of writing, so no windows are quoted here. Ivins is on Mountain time, which is two hours behind Eastern and one hour ahead of Pacific, and there is no network broadcast window for this event.
Where is the Bank of Utah Championship played?
The Bank of Utah Championship is played at Black Desert Golf Course at Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah, about 20 minutes west of St. George. The course opened its full 18 holes in May 2023, is the last of the 73 courses Tom Weiskopf designed, and is routed through a field of black lava rock at 3,100 feet of elevation.
Who is the defending Bank of Utah Championship champion?
Michael Brennan won the 2025 Bank of Utah Championship at 22 under par, shooting 262 and beating Rico Hoey by four shots. It was his third career PGA Tour start and his first as a professional, making him the first player since Jim Benepe at the 1988 Western Open to win in his first professional start on Tour. The win earned him a two-year exemption.
Who is the favorite to win the 2026 Bank of Utah Championship?
No favorite can be named honestly yet, because the field is not confirmed and commitments do not close until the Friday before tournament week. The BettorEdge community outright board has the tournament winner market open but had posted no live two-sided prices as of Tuesday, September 22, so no number is quoted here. In a full-field fall event without a top-10 player in it, a genuine favorite usually sits closer to 8 to 10 percent than to the 25 percent a superstar commands at a signature event.
What is the purse for the 2026 Bank of Utah Championship?
The PGA Tour lists the purse at $6 million, with 500 FedExCup points to the winner. The tournament's own marketing materials have quoted a figure above $6.5 million, so treat the Tour's number as the purse until the official prize-money breakdown posts during tournament week.
What kind of golf course is Black Desert Resort?
Black Desert Golf Course is a par 71 that the PGA Tour sets up at 7,421 yards, routed through black volcanic rock beneath the red cliffs of Greater Zion. The fairways average just 30 yards wide, which the Tour called the 12th-narrowest on Tour, the greens are bentgrass, and the primary hazard is unplayable lava rather than water or rough. At 3,100 feet the thinner air adds carry for the whole field, which is why all three par 5s, between 587 and 595 yards, are reachable and why the winning scores have been 23 under and 22 under.
What does the FedExCup Fall decide in 2026?
The FedExCup Fall decides 2027 PGA Tour status, and the threshold moved this season from the top 125 to the top 100 of the final points list. Nos. 101 through 150 receive conditional status in tiers instead of a full card. Players who finished inside the top 50 after the Tour Championship are already exempt and do not accrue fall points, while Nos. 51 to 60 earn starts in two signature events the following season through the Aon Next 10.
Why are the world's best players not at the Bank of Utah Championship?
The 2026 Presidents Cup is played the week before this event, September 24 to 27 at Medinah Country Club outside Chicago, which occupies two dozen of the world's best players. Beyond the calendar, the FedExCup Fall is built for players chasing status rather than those who already have it, and as of the 2026 Masters a fall win no longer earns an Augusta invitation, which removed the biggest incentive for an exempt star to add a fall start.
How do I bet on the Bank of Utah Championship?
Pick your outright, finishing position, make-the-cut or matchup bet and place it on BettorEdge against another real bettor at a community price. New users can get up to $100 after verifying their ID, with no deposit needed.
Is betting on BettorEdge legal?
Yes. BettorEdge is a peer-to-peer betting marketplace, legal across 45+ states, with identity verification built in. You are matched against other people, not a house that profits when you lose.
The bottom line
The Bank of Utah Championship is the most visually distinctive week on the PGA Tour schedule and one of the least understood. Two playings, two maiden champions, two winning scores within a shot of each other, and a golf course whose reputation as a bomber's playground in thin desert air is close to the opposite of what the numbers say wins here. The field is not knowable until commitments close and pairings post on September 30, and the community board will not carry real prices until the people posting them know who is teeing it up. Both are reasons to read this week early and bet it late. When the numbers arrive, ask whether the board is paying for altitude or for accuracy, because this golf course pays the second one.
Compare prices before Thursday's first tee
Outright boards move the moment the field closes and again the moment the first group is away. See the live BettorEdge board, back your Bank of Utah Championship pick peer to peer, and grab up to $100 when you verify your ID. Better odds. You keep more.
Read the line, then beat it.
Once you can read a price you can spot a bad one. BettorEdge shows real peer-to-peer odds, and they are often better than the book you would get stuck with.