The last day of the 2026 PRCA regular season will now include a $75,000-added open team roping, giving ropers on the NFR bubble one more chance to move—and giving those inside the top 15 one more way to fall out.
A standalone team roping with $75,000 added will run Sept. 30 at 377 Arena, the final day of the 2026 PRCA regular season, with the money counting toward the world standings that set the National Finals Rodeo field.
The roping is three steers and a short round, with every team getting all three head. It is open to anyone holding a PRCA card or a permit, with no limits and no qualifying requirements.
Arena owner Troy Gibbs is putting up the money. PRCA Hall of Famer and five-time world champion Tee Woolman, who manages 377, organized the event and is furnishing the cattle.
The date is what makes it consequential. Because the regular season closes Sept. 30 and the top 15 in each end advance to the NFR, a single afternoon in Stephenville could move ropers across the cutline in both directions.
“I think it’s amazing,” said Jake Long, the reigning world champion heeler. “The roughstock and stuff, they have all those good, big standalone events, and I think it’s amazing that we’re getting one. It’s an exciting way to end the year and do it in the Cowboy Capital of the World. I think it’s always been funny that the Stephenville rodeo had never really been that great, and for it to end there, it just seems like kind of a fitting end of the season.”
How it came together
Gibbs first raised the idea a year ago and kept circling back to it, Woolman said.
“He goes, ‘We need to do something for the team ropers that makes a difference in the standings,'” Woolman said. “We kicked it around a little bit last year, and then he goes, ‘Hey, I want to do that team roping.’ I said, ‘Like a standalone?’ He goes, ‘Yes.'”
Woolman took it to two-time world champ and PRCA event rep Kaleb Driggers, who walked him through what an approved standalone would cost and what it would take to get sanctioned.
“He goes, ‘It’s going to take X amount of money. It’s not a money-making deal,'” Woolman said. “And I’m like, OK, we’re OK with that.”
Gibbs opened at $50,000 added. He came back and said $75,000.
The date was Woolman’s call.
“I said Sept. 30, the last day of the season,” Woolman said. The roping runs Wednesday afternoon, timed so ropers coming from California and the rest of the late schedule can get back to Texas.”
What it pays
Woolman’s rough math has the day money landing around $3,000 to $3,500 a man, with the average paying roughly double that. Add a short round, and he figures a team could leave Stephenville with something in the neighborhood of $15,000 apiece.
“So it’s going to make a big difference right there at the end if somebody at the bottom wins, or even somebody at the top gets over the guys that’s in the lead,” Woolman said.
The payoff will follow the standard PRCA scale.
“We have no say-so on that,” Woolman said. “It’s just whatever they say.”
The PRCA’s Cinch Governor’s Cup in Sioux Falls will run the weekend prior, Sept. 25 to Sept. 27, with its $1.5 million payout and $166,667 added per event over three days, meaning nobody is really out of it heading into the last week of the season.
The bubble just got a lot louder
For anyone sitting outside the top 15 on Sept. 29, the roping is one more swing. For anyone sitting inside it, it’s one more way to lose the seat.
“Between Mandan, Sioux Falls, and now you add that in there—old school, it was like, man, if you were 10th with a few weeks left, you were pretty well in,” Long said. “It had to go really, really poorly for you not to make it. And now it’s like, it feels like you could be seventh and be like, man, if the right things happen, I could miss the Finals right here.”
Long, currently No. 15 in the world with $76,599 won, said the pressure is the tradeoff for what the sport has built.
“I was talking to somebody the other day and they’re like, man, I think it might take $70,000 or so just to make Houston,” Long said. “And it’s like, it wasn’t five years ago it took $70,000 to make the NFR. The leaps and bounds that we’ve made in a very short amount of time is unbelievable.”
Hunter Koch, No. 25 in the heeling with $65,964, sees the timing the same way Long does—and doesn’t mind it.
“It just makes it to where you never get to just relax. There’s always somebody coming that could get you,” Koch said. “So I think it keeps you zoned in and keeps you focused and keeps you paying attention. I kind of like that. And it also gives you an opportunity to get ahead of somebody or move up.”
Koch’s bigger point was that the team roping has been waiting on this.
“We needed something like that, because of the Roping Fiesta that the calf ropers have in San Angelo,” Koch said. “It’s about time we do something like that, because this is team roping—we jackpot more than anybody. So it’s cool we finally have a standalone team roping that counts toward something.”
No gimmicks
Both Long and Woolman kept coming back to the format. Everybody gets three head. Nothing is progressive. Nothing is top-loaded.
“The biggest thing I like about it is it’s not a gimmicky thing. It’s going to be a roping contest,” Long said. “It’s three in the short. It’s not some kind of weirdly survive thing and then top-loaded at the very end. It’s just show up. Best man’s going to win that day. I like stuff like that. I don’t like all the gimmicky where you can rope like crap in advance and all of a sudden you catch the right steer and you win way more than anybody else. You’re going to have to outrope everybody that day. We can have as many of them as we want to have. I’m fine with those.”
Long expects a massive entry—he guessed 150 teams or better—and said the openness is the point.
Woolman said that’s how Gibbs wanted it from the start.
“If you have a card or permit and you want to come, you’re more than welcome to come,” Woolman said. “That’s the way the association started, and that’s the way we’re going to do it.”
The cattle
Woolman is running his own steers—126 head that have never been roped. He planned to start breaking them in about two weeks out, then haul them to 377 for a small roping to give each one a run or two before Sept. 30.
“They’re not little bitty, weak steers. They got some size and age to them,” Woolman said. “I’m crossing my fingers that they’re going to be good.”
The score will be set once he sees what the cattle do.
Still to come
Whether the roping becomes an annual fixture is an open question. Woolman said the plan is to run it, watch it and adjust.
“We kind of made it that way for this one, and we’ll see how it goes and see what happens,” Woolman said.