Former CU golfer Jeremy Paul lands PGA Tour card for first time thanks to season-long performance on Korn Ferry Tour
By Gary Baines – 10/6/2024
What seemed likely after a season-opening victory — and a near certainty after a fifth-place finish at The Ascendant presented by Blue at TPC Colorado in July — is now a lock.
Former University of Colorado golfer Jeremy Paul is the proud owner of a 2025 PGA Tour card.
With the top 30 players in the season-long Korn Ferry Tour points earning exempt status on the PGA Tour, Paul finished No. 21on the list. He went into this weekend’s Korn Ferry Tour Championship with roughly a 99.99 percent chance of earning his PGA Tour card (according to PGATour.com), but he helped his cause with a ninth-place showing out of 74 players on Sunday in French Lick, Ind.
“Obviously you want to get to a certain threshold that for sure you’re going to get your card,” Paul told Colorado Golf Journal in mid-July after concluding The Ascendant at TPC Colorado. “But if you just get your card and finish 26-30 (on the points list), you just don’t get that many (PGA Tour) starts. It’s really important to get as high up as you can. When you play your first season on the PGA Tour it’s crucial to get as many opportunities as you can, so it matters to finish strong.”
In Indiana, Paul posted scores of 69-71-71-72 for a 5-under-par total, which left him four strokes behind champion Braden Thornberry. That lifted the former Buff from 22nd on the KFT points list to 21st.
Paul, a 30-year-old German who played for CU from 2013-17, won the Korn Ferry Tour’s season-opening Bahamas Great Exuma Classic in January and added a second top-5 finish at TPC Colorado in July. And now he’s earned a PGA Tour card for the first time in his career.
Paul has been a regular on the Korn Ferry Tour for the last three years. Including the 2024 Tour Championship, he has seven top-10 showings on the KFT over that stretch, with two of them coming at TPC Colorado — a third place in 2022 and a fifth place this year. He’s never played an event on the PGA Tour, but that will soon change.
“Obviously a long journey but it’s super rewarding to achieve this lifelong goal,” Paul told CUBuffs.com on Sunday night. “Golf is obviously super competitive, and the margins are so slim and you just continuously have to work and improve little things and you still never know when your time is coming.”
Paul becomes the fifth German player to earn a PGA Tour card through the KFT, joining Alex Cejka (2014, 2017), Stephan Jaeger (2017, 2018, 2020-21), Matti Schmid (2022), and Thomas Rosenmueller (2024).
(Photo: @KornFerryTour on X)
Paul’s twin brother Yannik, with whom he played at CU, has competed regularly on the DP World Tour since late 2021 and has one victory there to his credit — in the 2022 Mallorca Golf Open.
Another player with significant Colorado connections, former Air Force Academy golfer Kyle Westmoreland, came into the Tour Championship with a good chance of earning a 2025 PGA Tour card, standing in 34th on the points list. But Westmoreland, who played full-time on the PGA Tour in the 2022-23 season, struggled to a 79 on Sunday and finished 51st at the Tour Championship, which dropped him to 38th in the point standings.
Westmoreland will be among the players — ranked 31-60 on the KFT points list — who will be exempt into the final stage of the PGA Tour Q-school, where five PGA Tour cards will be up for grabs.
Among the players joining Jeremy Paul in earning a 2025 PGA Tour card through their KFT performance this year is Cristobal Del Solar (No. 14 in points), who won The Ascendant at TPC Colorado in July.
For all the scorers from the Korn Ferry Tour Championship, CLICK HERE.
About the Writer: Gary Baines has covered golf in Colorado continuously since 1983. He was a sports writer at the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, then the sports editor there, and has written regularly for ColoradoGolf.org since 2009. The University of Colorado Evans Scholar alum was inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. He owns and operates ColoradoGolfJournal.com