The playoff format has faced widespread criticism in recent years. In an attempt to make the season's final event more appealing for TV viewers, Scheffler began with just a two-shot lead at East Lake hardly a fair reflection of his dominance over his competitors in 2024.
Before a format change in 2019, Scheffler would have secured the FedEx Cup title weeks before the season ended. Instead, he had to wait until the Tour Championship to confirm his victory.
And he did so in a manner that ridiculed the tour's attempts to create an exciting finish, leading by seven after the first round and never facing a real challenge from the pursuing group, reports the Mirror .
Many critics of the format would prefer to see the Tour Championship played as a standalone event with every player starting at level par, rather than the current setup. Scheffler started at 10-under and the rest of the 30-man field teed off between eight-under and level par, depending on their place in the FedEx Cup standings.
In previous years, the consensus player of the year has failed to win the FedEx Cup, including in 2022 when Scheffler was beaten to the title by Rory McIlroy despite starting the Tour Championship atop the standings after winning four tournaments including The Masters.
Had the Tour Championship been a standard strokeplay event and the FedEx Cup format pre-2019 been in place, Scheffler would have still lifted the season-long title but Morikawa would have won the event at 22-under-par, one shot clear of Sahith Theegala and two ahead of the world No. 1.
World No. 3 and three-time FedEx Cup champion McIlroy has declared his support for the new format, insisting it is more entertaining for viewers if the winner of the FedEx Cup is not decided until the final event.
But 33 year old Pepperell, a panellist on The Chipping Forecast podcast, believes it would have been much more satisfying viewing had the Tour Championship been allowed to "stand its own two feet", describing the current iteration of the FedEx Cup as "meaningless".
"It's not even that it's nonsense, it's just entirely meaningless and one wonders why we are playing this game," he remarked. "And the way you can tell that is no one really wants the outcome and yet it seems like our only choice is to have the outcome we've got, and it's crazy. And the game will end up losing, I think there'll end up being a pretty catastrophic, at some point, coming down to reality.
"Watching it on Sunday, I just felt sorry for the tournament because if the tournament had existed on its own two feet as such, it would've actually been quite an entertaining finish because Morikawa, Theegala and Scheffler were all on a similar score. The tournament is entirely in service to the season-long race which is crazy because the FedEx Cup as an order of merit, by definition, means the whole season is in service to that and that's how it should be.
"And this is why I fundamentally disagree with people like Rory who quite often [emphasise] the importance of entertainment. Well, you can't keep catering to a society that finds one thing entertaining this minute and something else the next minute. Because if you do, you end up where we are which is entirely lost with a very gimmicky format. And I think it would be very wise for the PGA Tour to go back to something that resembles something we all value and that is merit.
"And the season-long race should be based purely on merit and if Scottie Scheffler wins it three weeks out then that is the thing you celebrate because that is what success looks like."
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