Earning a PGA Tour card is an extremely difficult task. But maintaining it is no easy feat either. Even more difficult? Get your card back after losing it. Three PGA Tour veterans proved that the hard way on Sunday at the Korn Ferry Tour Championship, narrowly missing out on Tour privileges.
After changes to the qualifying rules in recent years, only the top 20 finishers of the Korn Ferry Tour Championship earned PGA Tour cards for the 2026 season. You can read all about the lucky ones who bought their Tour tickets on Sunday here.
But in this area, we’re concerned with the other side of the equation: the players who have lived the life of a PGA Tour professional, fought all year on the Korn Ferry Tour to get back and came up agonizingly short on Sunday.
The silver lining for these three professionals? They all finished high enough in the Korn Ferry standings to earn full status there in 2026, where they will mount new campaigns to regain their cards.
PGA Tour pros who missed tickets at the KFT Championship
Justin Suh
Justin Suh, a 28-year-old former PGA Tour professional from San Jose, has played in 90 PGA Tour events in his professional golf career, posting two top-5 and five top-10 finishes.
Suh played the full season of 29 Tour events in 2024. But he made just 12 cuts and failed to record a top 10. As a result, he finished 162nd in the FedEx Cup standings, losing his playing privileges and dropping to the Korn Ferry Tour.
On this season’s Korn Ferry Tour, he won the Argentina Open in March and collected two more top 10s. But it wasn’t enough to return to the big leagues.
Entering the Korn Ferry Tour Championship at 24th in the standings, just outside the top 20 card-earning ranks, Suh finished T31 to stay tantalizingly close, but ultimately did not get his card back.
Russell Knox
Russell Knox, a 40-year-old Scottish professional, played successfully on the PGA Tour for several years, recording two wins at the 2015 WGC-HSBC Championship and the 2016 Travelers Championship.
But his last full season was 2022/23, when he made 23 of 37 appearances, finishing 144th in the Fedex Cup standings and losing his Tour card.
He played in 10 Tour events in 2024 and then received three sponsor invitations in 2025, missing two cuts and finishing 68th at the Corales Puntacana Championship.
Knox made 21 Korn Ferry Tour starts in 2025 and earned a second-place finish early in the season at the Bahamas Great Abaco Classic, along with three other top 10s.
But a disappointing T55 finish at the Korn Ferry Tour Championship on Sunday dropped Knox from 34th to 36th.n the final ranking of the KFTleaving him 16 spots short of regaining his PGA Tour card.
Dylan Wu
Twenty-nine-year-old Dylan Wu, an Oregon native, should be known to many golf fans. He played 33 PGA Tour events in 2022-2023, finishing 86th in the standings to retain his card.
But in 28 starts in 2024, Wu had just one top 10 and fell to 119th in the FedEx Cup standings, losing his Tour card. Although he competed in 13 Tour events last season and achieved some good results, he only managed enough points to finish 170th in the standings.
He played just eight events on the Korn Ferry Tour in 2025, so a T31 finish on Sunday could only improve his position from 71st to 69th, well below the Tour card cutoff.
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