Scottie Scheffler has laid out the flaws of the PGA Tour's playoff structure, with no certainty that he will win the FedEx Cup despite his incredible six-win season on tour.
Scheffler has been the game's dominant force in 2024, with wins at The Masters and the Olympics to go with more than $30 million in on-course earnings. And although Xander Schauffele has had a career-defining season with two major championship victories, Scheffler's relentlessness on the PGA Tour has given him an enormous lead in the season-long FedEx Cup standings as the playoffs begin at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tennessee with the FedEx St. Jude Championship on Thursday.
But all that work will be worth relatively little when Scheffler tees off at East Lake in Atlanta for the Tour Championship in two weeks. The PGA Tour changed the format of the season-ending tournament five years ago to make it a more compelling product for TV audiences, rather than a setup which fairly rewarded players for their performances over the season.
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Scheffler is certain to be atop the standings by the time the final tournament begins and he will start the event at 10-under-par. As it stands, Schauffele will start at eight-under, and third-placed Rory McIlroy will be at seven-under.
Scheffler fell victim to the structure in 2022, when he held a big lead in the FedEx Cup heading to East Lake but his head start was erased by McIlroy, who lifted the title and claimed the $18m top prize.
He also was the FedEx Cup leader going into the final event last season, but did not produce his best golf and lost out to Viktor Hovland by 16 shots. Scheffler made his feelings clear about the format at his pre-tournament press conference on Wednesday.
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"I think it's silly," he said. "You can't call it a season-long race and have it come down to one tournament. Hypothetically we get to East Lake and my neck flares up and it doesn't heal the way it did at The Players, I finish 30th in the FedExCup because I had to withdraw from the last tournament? Is that really the season-long race? No. It is what it is.
"It's a fun tournament. I don't really consider it the season-long race like I think the way it's called. But you've got to figure out a way to strike a balance between it being a good TV product and it still being a season-long race. Right now, I don't know exactly how the ratings are or anything like that, but I know for a fact you can't really quite call it the season-long race when it comes down to one stroke play tournament on the same golf course each year."
World No. 1 Scheffler, 28, has a philosophical attitude to the Tour Championship and what it means to him. He continued: "At the end of the day, I try not to think too much about the results at tournaments, and I'm not going to look back on my season really any differently if I don't win East Lake. I'm going to show up there, do my best.
"I think I've been No. 1 the last two years going into the tournament. Went in 2022 having a really great chance to win and wasn't able to pull it off, and last year really just playing poorly pretty much the entire week.
"I've had close calls there, and I'm looking forward to the challenge of going back there and playing with the lead again. We'll see what happens. Those guys could catch me in these next couple of weeks. But I'm looking forward to hopefully fending them off and going into East Lake with a lead."
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