John Deere Classic 2017 purse: Bryson DeChambeau’s payout is $1 million in prize money

The John Deere Classic is a cult favorite for those who love its underdog and unheralded status. The JDC never has the strongest field and its spot on the schedule is, well, less than ideal the week before the only major championship in another part of the globe. And the purse is among the smallest on the entire PGA Tour schedule, even with a massive increase for 2017.

This year, the John Deere purse is up over the $5 million mark for the first time. The total purse is $5.6 million, which is a huge jump from last year’s $4.8 million amount. The increase also puts the JDC in the $1 million-winner’s club, which includes just about every single tournament on the PGA Tour schedule. The winner will get $1,008,000 at TPC Deere Run.

Even if it is among the smallest on Tour, this is obviously a really nice payout for playing a silly little game. The Scottish Open’s purse on Sunday at Dundonald was $7 million, an increase thanks in part to the European Tour’s new Rolex Series. It’s rare for a PGA Tour purse to be smaller than its Euro Tour counterpart on a Sunday, but the Rolex Series has concentrated a big pile of cash into those eight events. And the Scottish is maybe the Euro Tour’s strongest field of the season with players from all over the world in a week early for some competitive links prep prior to the British Open.

While the $800,000 increase for this year is huge, the total purse is still only one of two (the Wyndham in Greensboro being the other) that are not yet in the $6 million territory. That gives you a sense of how small last year’s purse was and how it stuck out on the rest of the schedule. The Sanderson Farms Championship had a $4.2 million purse, but it’s a wraparound-schedule fall event and played opposite a WGC in China, so it’s not really fair to throw that in and compare it to a regular season event.

But the people don’t love this event, or any other on the schedule, because of the money. And we love the JDC for its little-engine-that-could identity and a course that can yield dramatic Sunday leaderboard movement. Besides, these players are probably less concerned about the payout and more about a secured PGA Tour card for two years, a Masters invite, and an immediate birth in next week’s British Open.

Here are your payout totals for the top 25 on Sunday in the Quad Cities (ties will obviously impact some of these amounts and we’ll update when results go final):

Update: The artist, or golfing scientist, or whatever you want to call him, Bryson DeChambeau, is your winner in Moline. It’s DeChambeau’s’s first PGA Tour win and the biggest on-course payday of his career. (He signed a pretty fat contract off the course with Cobra-Puma when he turned pro.) Here are your final payout numbers: