Tour Championship Primer: The Top 30 Battle for the FedEx Cup in Atlanta
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Following 42 weeks of tournament golf that dates to last September, the PGA Tour will conclude its 2022-23 season this week at the Tour Championship in Atlanta. Only 30 players will participate at East Lake after a season of accumulating FedEx Cup points to make the 70-player playoff field two weeks ago at the FedEx St. Jude Invitational.
After being cut to 50 players last week for the BMW Championship, only 30 are left—and all of them are assured of starts in at least three major championships next year as well as a spot in the 2024 season-opening Sentry tournament.
The Tour Championship at East Lake is now in its fifth year of a format that sees a staggered-strokes start based on the top 30 FedEx Cup standings. It means that Scottie Scheffler will begin the event on Thursday at -10, followed by Viktor Hovland at -8, Rory McIlroy at -7, Jon Rahm at -6 and Lucas Glover at -5. The progression goes down to players who finished 26th to 30th starting at even par.
While the system remains awkward and controversial, it satisfies the Tour’s and FedEx’s desire to crown a single champion after the season. Players are rewarded for getting to this point of the year by having a small head start in the tournament via strokes. Someone who finished 30th is far enough back that their chances are not great, but they have a chance nonetheless.
Following it is easy—the scoreboard will reflect wherever starts in relation to par. But the bottom line is it is possible that a player who does not shoot the lowest 72-hole score wins the FedEx Cup. That is the format.
But that distinction is important enough that the Official World Golf Ranking only acknowledges the actual 72-hole scores of the competitors. The player who shoots the lowest over four days—regardless of the FedEx Cup—gets the top number of OWGR points.
The idea behind the plan was to get away from having the possibility of two different winners. In 2018, the last year of the prior format, Tiger Woods won the Tour Championship for his 80th career PGA Tour victory while Justin Rose was the overall FedEx Cup champion.
While the move to the new system had already been announced, that result that week highlighted why the decision-makers changed the format: the FedEx Cup champion was not celebrated nearly as much as the tournament champion. Now that is no longer an issue.
One thing the Tour might consider going forward is to give the player with the lowest 72-hole score—if he is different from the FedEx Cup champion—credit for a PGA Tour win. While the victory might not be celebrated and prize money would not be any different, at least there would be some other reward for shooting the lowest score of the week.
For now, there is no such distinction. The winner of the overall FedEx Cup gets an $18 million bonus, with $1 million of it deferred. The payouts go down to $500,000 for finishing 30th.