The regular season ended in Greensboro on Sunday, and by Monday morning the FedExCup standings were final enough that nobody outside the top 70 has anything left to play for this year. That is the strange rhythm of the PGA Tour’s playoff structure: a season’s worth of results gets condensed into a single number, the field gets cut roughly in half twice over three weeks, and the whole thing starts again Thursday at TPC Southwind in Memphis, where 69 players will tee it up in the FedEx St. Jude Championship with a spot in the following week’s BMW Championship the minimum acceptable outcome.
A runaway favourite
Scottie Scheffler will start the week where he finished the regular season, at the top of the points table, having claimed the $10 million bonus that comes with leading the FedExCup standings when the qualifying period closes. It is the fourth time in five years he has topped that particular list, which says as much about the gap between him and the rest of the world’s best players as any win total could. Matt Fitzpatrick and Cameron Young round out the top three in points behind him, and Rory McIlroy is in the field as well, but the betting markets have treated this as close to a one-man tournament since the moment the Wyndham Championship finished. Scheffler has won this event before. He would like to win it again, and on recent form there is little reason to expect anyone will stop him doing it.
The defence nobody has managed
Justin Rose returns to Memphis as the defending champion, having won last year’s edition in a playoff, and he arrives carrying a piece of tournament trivia that has nothing to do with his own game and everything to do with how stubborn this particular title has proven to be. No player has successfully defended the FedEx St. Jude Championship since it became part of the FedExCup Playoffs in 2007. Dustin Johnson has won the event three times, comfortably the most of anyone in that stretch, and even he never managed it in back-to-back years. It is not a curse in any meaningful sense, just a reminder of how differently a course can play from one August to the next, and how little carries over from a winning week when 69 of the tour’s best show up determined to take it from you. Rose knows the odds better than most. He is also the sort of player who has made a habit of ignoring odds that do not suit him.
Fleetwood’s quieter title defence
There is a second defence going on this week that has attracted less attention than Rose’s, mostly because it does not hinge on this course specifically. Tommy Fleetwood arrives as the reigning FedExCup champion after winning the Tour Championship at East Lake last August, and he begins this year’s playoff run ninth in the standings, comfortably positioned but well back of the pace Scheffler has set. Fleetwood’s route to a second FedExCup has to go through three separate weeks rather than one hot Sunday, and TPC Southwind is simply the first hurdle. He has not talked about the target in grand terms this week, which tracks with how he handled the build-up to winning it the first time. The louder conversation belongs to Scheffler. The one worth watching quietly is Fleetwood’s.
A course built to punish good ball-striking, not reward it
TPC Southwind does not get talked about with the reverence reserved for the tour’s classic venues, but it is a properly difficult test dressed up as an ordinary one. Ron Prichard designed the course in consultation with Hubert Green and Fuzzy Zoeller, and it opened in 1988 with a mandate to challenge the best players in the world rather than flatter them. Ninety-four bunkers and ten water hazards are packed into a routing that never feels excessive, which is its own kind of design achievement, and the course was ranked ninth hardest of 51 PGA Tour venues in a 2011 survey despite offering nothing in the way of length by modern standards. The 14th, a 239-yard par 3 guarded by water short and bunkers everywhere else, has been one of the toughest holes of its type on tour for two decades running. It rewards precise iron play and punishes anyone who tries to bully it, which suits a field this week that is heavy on the sort of ball-strikers who would rather work a shot into a flag than overpower a hole.
What is actually on the line
The winner takes home 750 FedExCup points and whatever bragging rights come with breaking a streak that has outlasted every favourite who has come through Memphis in playoff form since 2007. Everyone else in the field is really playing for survival into next week’s BMW Championship at Bellerive, where the group narrows again before the final 30 head to East Lake for the Tour Championship at the end of the month. Scheffler is the story until he is not. Rose is the story if history repeats in reverse. Either way, the three weeks that decide the FedExCup season start now, and TPC Southwind rarely makes it easy for anyone to find out how they will end.