Scottie Scheffler won again, a fifth victory in another remarkable season that has now seen him post 13 consecutive top-eight finishes on the PGA Tour, giving him an insurmountable lead in the FedEx Cup ...
Well, hold on.
For all the great play Scheffler has put forth in 2025, he now heads to the Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta as one of the 30 players to qualify for the tournament. He has no advantage—other than skill—and will need to win the event outright in order to win a second consecutive FedEx Cup title.
That is the reality of the new system put in place this year, scrapping the unpopular starting-strokes format that would have seen Scheffler begin the final event at 10 under par (starting strokes) and with a two-shot lead over second-place Rory McIlroy and a 10-shot advantage over the bottom of the field.
After six years of that format, the Tour was looking for something new and it has called 2025 a “bridge year,” which means that something else could be in play for 2026.
For now, the reality is a FedEx Cup champion who—while having to advance to East Lake—might just win this one tournament.
McIlroy weighed the pros and cons of the various systems that Tour has employed since the FedEx Cup playoff began in 2007. There was a season-long points race as well as a separate Tour Championship that counted toward the season title; then it was the starting-strokes format with a single winner; and now the latest format that sees the points scrapped and a 30-player tournament for the FedEx title.
“I come from a place where Liverpool won the Premier League last year with five games to spare,” McIlroy said of the soccer league that has no season-ending playoff structure. “That's sometimes what happens in sports. Sometimes you have guys or you have a team that is just that much better than everyone else that season, and they are the deserving winner.
“I think from a player perspective, it seems like the consensus was that people didn’t like the starting strokes. So to get rid of that is a good thing. But I now think that the Tour Championship not being starting strokes, it’s sort of its own thing now. Obviously you win the Tour Championship, which then means you win the FedEx Cup, but I don’t necessarily think that means that you’re the season-long winner ... unless Scottie Scheffler wins it and he is the season-long winner.
“Everyone knows Scottie Scheffler is the—you know, he’s won two majors this year. He’s head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the points ... then everything resets, and it’s sort of ... I guess I see it as more of a one-off event than a culmination of the entire season.”
Nobody is feeling sorry for Scheffler. The Tour shifted the bonus money to reward the regular season and the leader in points through the BMW. Combined with the Comcast Business bonus pool that is also paid out after the Wyndham Championship, Scheffler has pocketed $23 million in bonus money ($15 million from the FedEx bonus pool, $8 million from the Comcast pool, $5 million for leading after the BMW).
Another $40 million is at stake in Atlanta, with $10 million going to the winner. If Scheffler doesn’t win this week, he won’t be the FedEx champ but he’ll still undoubtedly be the player of the year. Yeah, the Tour might want to tweak this, but there is certainly no shame in crowning a FedEx winner who managed to get to an elite field and then beat them all.
Justin Rose, who won the FedEx Cup in 2018 when there was a separate Tour Championship winner (Tiger Woods), is seemingly O.K. with a new way to decide it.
“I think that winning it any way is amazing,” Rose said. “I think that we’ve had some fun sort of formats. Obviously we’ve had new ways now this year of sort of rewarding great play during the season. In the past we’ve been trying to find models that reward the season but make it all about playing well when it counts, and I think now it’s just like a nice little balance of that.
“We now have important weeks [with] the other bonuses that are available to players. Playing well to time those is still incredibly important. But then you kind of get back to Atlanta being centrally the Tour Championship for the FedEx Cup. I think it’s nice to have the 72 holes mean something again and be a true test, because you could be the best guy in the week and earn the best ranking points for being the best over 72 holes but you wouldn’t necessarily come away with the trophy.
“For me it’s a really clean way to finish the year, and a lot on the line, plenty on the line, more than enough on the line for us to go, wow, this is a huge opportunity and a lot of fun and makes the tournament stand above everything else.”
The Ryder Cup dilemma
The U.S. Ryder Cup team saw its six automatic qualifiers decided on Sunday at the BMW Championship, where there was only slight movement, with Harris English moving ahead of Bryson DeChambeau in the last two spots. Scottie Scheffler, J.J. Spaun, Xander Schauffele and Russell Henley got the first four spots.
DeChambeau’s plight is impressive when you consider he was able to play in just eight qualifying events—compared to 20 or more for some. In the two-year qualifying period, only the Players Championship and the four majors counted from 2024. This year, the qualifying period began at the season-opening Sentry with regular PGA Tour events getting one point per $1,000 earned and the four majors getting 1.5 points.
Because he plays for LIV Golf, DeChambeau couldn’t earn points in Tour events and thus missed all of the $20 million signature events, where more points are available due to bigger purses.
He got into the top six on the basis of his six top-10 finishes in majors over the past two years, including a win at the U.S. Open and two runner-up finishes at the PGA Championship. He also finished tied for fifth at this year’s Masters and tied for 10th at the British Open. He missed two cuts in majors out of those eight.
Now comes the hard part for captain Keegan Bradley and his assistants.
It is likely that Justin Thomas and Collin Morikawa will take the next two spots having finished seventh and eighth. But there are no easy calls after that. Sam Burns helped his cause with a strong BMW Championship, but does one tournament with some five weeks to go matter?
Bradley’s own playing plight seems murkier than ever now as well. What about Cam Young and Ben Griffin and Patrick Cantlay and Andrew Novak and Brian Harman? All of those players have been in the mix but nobody has truly stepped up recently. Does Rickie Fowler get a look after having advanced through two playoff events?
This week’s Tour Championship might provide some answers but Bradley’s picks will come on Aug. 27—a full month prior to the Ryder Cup. How much does recent form matter?
Deal or no deal?
The PGA Tour and LIV Golf League both conclude their seasons this week (the PGA Tour’s FedEx Fall will continue next month) but the thought of the two entities forging peace appears bleak. There have essentially been no talks in months and how it is to be resolved—if it all—remains extremely tenuous.
New CEO Brian Rolapp is just into his job at the PGA Tour and is expected to meet with the media this week in Atlanta. He has undoubtedly not had much time to tackle that thorny issue as of yet. Meanwhile, LIV Golf continues to make plans for the future—it announced over the weekend that it will return to Indianapolis next year and has announced several tournament dates for 2026. The PGA Tour will undoubtedly evolve with its new for-profit structure but next year’s schedule will look similar to 2025.
What it all means, of course, is the inability for some key players to compete against each other outside of the majors or a sporadic DP World Tour event. Major winners Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Cam Smith and the league’s five-time winner this season, Joaquin Niemann, are prohibited from playing in PGA Tour events.
This has become less of a worrisome issue for PGA Tour sponsors, some of whom waited to renew their deals or perhaps sought to do short-term contracts while waiting for this situation to play out. (According to Sports Business Journal, RBC has signed on for multiple years at both Hilton Head and the Canadian Open.) And it doesn’t mean there isn’t a desire to see some resolution.
One who remains hopeful is Dr. Pawan Munjal. He is best recognized as the man sitting next to Tiger Woods each year prior to the start of the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas. Munjal is the executive chairman of Hero MotoCorp, the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles and scooters.
Based in India, the company has taken a keen interest in golf. Last week, Munjal hosted a Q&A with Hero ambassadors Akshay Bhatia and Sahith Theegala at the BMW Championship. The two Indian-American golfers shared their stories and Munjal afterward expressed his desire to see some kind of deal.
“I’m still very hopeful,” Munjal said. “I know they’re talking and I’m talking to a whole lot of people myself and trying to pick up the threads and put it all together. As a sponsor, I surely want everyone to come together for the game of golf to grow.”
In addition to the Hero World Challenge, Hero sponsors two tournaments on the DP World Tour—the Hero Dubai Desert Classic, won earlier this year by Tyrrell Hatton, as well as the Hero Indian Open, won by Eugenio Chacarra. It also sponsors the Hero Women’s Indian Open. (According to Forbes, Munjal’s net worth is $3.5 billion.)
In the aftermath of the LIV Golf League’s emergence in 2022, Hero dropped Indian golfer Anirban Lahiri as a sponsor. But a year later, after the June 2023 “framework agreement,” Munjal was at a LIV Golf event in England playing in the pro-am with Phil Mickelson
He has attended several since and has talked about bringing a LIV event to India, along with the other events the company supports.
Munjal said he has met with LIV Golf’s CEO Scott O’Neil as well as leadership at the DP World Tour and PGA Tour. From his perspective, there is optimism that something will still transpire, even if from the outside it looks far from the case now.
As for Woods playing in the Bahamas in December, Munjal had little insight. The host of the tournament has missed all of this year after suffering an Achilles injury in the spring.
“All I can say is he’s made three comebacks (at the Hero), right? And we’re hoping for a fourth,” Munjal said. “If anyone can do it, it’s Tiger, who has the strength and perseverance.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Scottie Scheffler Has One Advantage Over Everyone Else at Tour Championship.
