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Just 28 days after lifting the Fortinet Cup trophy as the 2025 PGA TOUR Americas No. 1 player, Michael Brennan took advantage of a sponsor exemption to become a PGA TOUR champion at the Bank of Utah Championship. The 23-year-old was in the lead for the final 54 holes and delivered a commanding performance to win the FedExCup Fall event by four strokes, locking up PGA TOUR membership through the 2027 season.
“I’ve dreamed for a long time about playing and winning on the PGA TOUR, so it feels amazing to make it happen,” said Brennan, who was making only his third start on golf’s biggest stage. “I was just grateful to be in the field, and it turned out to be a really good week.”
The victory caps a remarkable stretch for Brennan, who will skip the Korn Ferry Tour entirely after earning full status there for 2026 as a three-time winner and season-long No. 1 on PGA TOUR Americas.
At the Bank of Utah Championship, he carried the exceptional momentum he built over the final stretch of the 2025 PGA TOUR Americas season. Between August and September, he won three times in five weeks and also had two other top-five finishes. He captured the BioSteel Championship in Windsor (Aug. 10), won a playoff at the CRMC Championship presented by Northern Pacific Center in Minnesota (Aug. 31), and earned a third title at the ATB Classic in Edmonton (Sept. 14).
He had a strong pace right from the start of the season, opening with a tie for third at the Abierto Telecom del Centro presented by Zurich in Cordoba, Argentina, and a tie for fourth at the ECP Brazil Open at the Olympic Golf Course in Rio de Janeiro. He added two more top-10s at the Diners Club Perú Open in Lima and the Bupa Championship in Mexico City to finish the Latin America Swing ranked seventh in the Fortinet Cup Points List.
Across 16 starts on PGA TOUR Americas, Brennan compiled three wins, eight top-fives and 12 top-10s. He led the Tour in nearly every major statistical category: Scoring Average (67.00), Strokes Gained: Total (+2.55), Birdie to Bogey ratio (3.35), rounds in the 60s (49 of 59), rounds under par (54 of 59), total birdies (312) and eagles (13).
“It’s given me so much great experience playing on (PGA TOUR Americas) this year and having some success,” said Brennan, after carding a second-round 65 that led to a share of the 36-hole lead in Utah. “I feel like I’ll definitely be more prepared for this weekend after having those experiences.”
Between his wire-to-wire victory at the BioSteel Championship and the opening round of the Times Colonist Victoria Open, Brennan led or shared the lead in 10 of 15 rounds — an impressive run that helped him handle the pressure of being out front. That comfort showed again in Utah, where he held the outright lead over the final two rounds of his first PGA TOUR event as a professional.
“Jeff Kirkpatrick, my caddie, probably believes in me more than anyone — maybe other than my parents. After the great year we had (on PGA TOUR Americas), he told me, ‘We’re not going to the Korn Ferry Tour.’ Whether it was through something like this or Q-School, I can’t believe he was right,” added the Wake Forest University graduate who joined PGA TOUR Americas as No. 12 in the 2024 PGA TOUR University Ranking.
With Sunday’s triumph, Brennan earned exemptions into THE PLAYERS Championship, the PGA Championship and the RBC Heritage in 2026. He also rose to No. 43 in the Official World Golf Ranking — a fitting reward for one of the game’s brightest young talents whose confidence, as his caddie likes to remind him, has always been justified.
