Here we go again.
Nineteen years into its inception, it seems the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs are still a work in progress. And this year, the season-ending Tour Championship is implementing its third format.
From 2007 to 2018, there were two winners at East Lake: a FedEx Cup champion, which was whoever had the most season-long points at the end of the Tour Championship, and a winner of the 30-man tournament itself. Then, in 2019, starting strokes were implemented. That meant whoever was first in the FedEx Cup standings entering the Tour Championship began the event at 10 under, and No. 30 started at even par.
Now, the starting strokes have been ditched (a decision made midseason), and this week, all 30 players will start at even par, just like any other Tour event. Therefore, the Tour Championship winner will also claim the season-long FedEx Cup title.
That has drawn mixed reactions.
“I think the way it is right now, it maybe overvalues play at the end of the year in terms of qualifying for this tournament,” world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler said Wednesday at East Lake. “And it may—I don’t know if cheapen is the right word, but I think having such a drastic difference in the points in the last two weeks, I think creates some inconsistencies in terms of rewarding the great seasons we have in order to qualify for the tournament.”
To qualify for the first playoff event, the FedEx St. Jude Championship, players need to finish within the top 70 in FedEx Cup points following the regular-season finale. For the penultimate event, the BMW Championship, it’s the top 50. However, whoever finishes top 70 or top 50 those weeks don’t advance. Instead, it’s what a player’s position in the standings is after those tournaments. A top 10 vs. a missed cut in March could be the difference in someone extending their season in August.
Justin Thomas, though, thinks the new, cutthroat format could have viewers on the edge of their seats.
“It has the opportunity to be an unbelievable week in the sense of you could have 15, 20 guys that have chance to win on Sunday,” he said, “which is pretty cool when it comes to in terms of the FedEx Cup. That’s awesome, but it’s more of just playing the tournament. I think with the starting strokes, it was very, very dependent on where you were, and more often than not, other than a handful of guys, your week was pretty quickly determined of your chances on the first—or not the first nine holes, but your first day.”
On the contrary, Rory McIlroy feels the FedEx Cup points list leader deserves some sort of advantage. Last year, for example, Scheffler, who had six wins entering East Lake, began at 10 under. Now, with five wins under his belt in 2025, he’s on a level playing field with Harry Hall, who is winless and has the same number of top 10s as Scheffler victories.
“I’m maybe part of the minority,” McIlroy said, “I didn’t hate the starting strokes. I thought that the player that played the best during the course of the season should have had an advantage coming in here. But the majority of people just didn't like the starting strokes. Whether it were players or fans—I was on the [Player Advisory Council] when we were trying to go through that, and really it was just a way to try to simplify the advantage that the top players were going to get over the course of the week instead of [NBC broadcaster] Steve Sands doing calculations on a white board.”
But just six years later, that design was scrapped, and it was back to the drawing board. A report earlier in the year suggested that the Tour was considering match play at East Lake. It made sense on the surface. The first-ranked player plays the 30th-ranked player in a bracket. If you win, you advance. If the Kansas City Chiefs go 17-0 but lose their first playoff game to an 8-9 Pittsburgh Steelers team, nobody will call it unfair. Many PGA Tour pros, though, weren’t fans of the match play idea.
“Match play was on the table,” McIlroy said, “and that got canned for this year. That might be brought back up in the conversation for next year or the year after. I think it's just hard for the players to reconcile that we play stroke play for every week of the year but then the season-ending tournament is going to be decided by match play. I think it was just hard for the players to get their heads around that.”
So next year, in the 20th go-round of the FedEx Cup playoffs, there could be another tweak.
“Competition should be easy to follow,” new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp said Wednesday. “The regular season and postseason should be connected in a way that builds towards a Tour Championship.”
However, it appears there’s no perfect solution.
“People love the comparisons to other sports, but golf is simply not like other sports,” Scheffler said. “I’m just going to leave it at that.”
But regardless of how the PGA Tour’s top players feel about their so-called Super Bowl, they will tee it up Thursday in Atlanta, vying for $10 million from the $40 million purse. Maybe the season-long champion will be Scheffler, or it could be Jacob Bridgeman.
The uncertainty is what makes it intriguing—at least for this year.
“I think with the format change or with whatever the money is,” McIlroy said, “we’re still playing for the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup, and that’s enough to play as hard as possible for.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as PGA Tour Stars Have Sharp Reactions to Imperfect Tour Championship Changes.
