By the time this week’s BMW Championship finishes at Bellerive, the field will have shrunk from 70 to 50 to 30, and the survivors will head to East Lake next week to settle the FedExCup the way they have for the past two seasons: as a straight 72-hole stroke-play event, everybody starting on even par, whoever shoots the lowest number over four rounds walks off with the trophy and the ten million dollars. Almost nobody misses what came before it. I do.
For six seasons, from 2019 through 2024, the Tour Championship began with players stapled to the leaderboard in the order they finished the regular season and the Playoffs that preceded it. The FedExCup points leader started the week at ten under par. Second place started at eight under. It went down from there in careful increments until the players furthest back in the standings began at even par, and the winner of the golf tournament that week and the winner of the FedExCup were, by design, the same person. Fans hated it. Scottie Scheffler called it silly. Sam Burns said it created a disconnect between a season played evenly and a finale that was not. The PGA Tour’s own Fan Forward feedback process came back overwhelmingly against it, and the format was retired after 2024 to something close to universal relief.
What got lost along with the head start
The complaint against the old format was always about presentation, and it was a fair complaint on those terms. It looked strange on a television graphic to see a player start a tournament already ten shots clear of nothing, and it took real explaining to a casual viewer why the leaderboard on Thursday morning did not match the scores anyone had actually made. But the presentation problem obscured what the format was actually doing, which was translating three months of FedExCup points, earned across roughly forty tournaments and thousands of shots, into something that still mattered on the very last day. It made the regular season and the Playoffs the substance of the competition, and East Lake the venue where that substance got its final say.
Take that away and East Lake becomes, mechanically, just another stroke-play tournament, no different in structure from the Wells Fargo or the Genesis, that happens to carry a bigger cheque and a trophy with a different name on it. Tommy Fleetwood’s win there last year was one of the most likeable results of the season, a player with a hundred and sixty-four PGA Tour starts and six runner-up finishes finally breaking through, and nobody would want to take a shred of that away from him. But it is worth asking whether a FedExCup that ran the way it is supposed to, points accumulated across a full season and carried forward into the finale, would have produced the same winner, or whether Fleetwood’s brilliant week at East Lake simply happened to coincide with a format that made the previous eleven months functionally irrelevant to the outcome.
A play-off shaped like a tournament
There is a reasonable defense of even-par stroke play as the fairest possible test of who plays the best golf over four days, and nobody should begrudge a tournament for wanting to be that. The trouble is that the Tour Championship is not supposed to be answering the question of who played the best golf that week. The regular Tour schedule already answers that question fifty times a year. The Tour Championship exists to answer a different and harder question, which is who was the best player across an entire season, and a format that resets everyone to zero on the first tee is structurally incapable of answering it. It just answers the easier question again, in a nicer location, for more money.
None of this is an argument that the old format was perfect. The math behind the starting strokes was never as intuitive as it should have been, and a sport that already asks casual fans to understand strokes gained and FedExCup projections did not need one more number nobody could explain at a barbecue. But the fix for a presentation problem should have been better presentation, not the quiet abandonment of the idea that a season of golf ought to count for something when the season is over. East Lake now crowns whoever plays best for four days in Atlanta. It used to crown whoever had the best year in golf. Those are not the same tournament, and I am not convinced the sport traded up.