Elephant in the room could trigger $116m golf shake-up as showpiece sparks ‘fairness’ debate

The PGA Tour’s top player for the season will be decided at East Lake this weekend with the Tour Championship, where the winner will also take home a staggering A$26m prize.

Jason Day is the lone Australian in the field, making his first trip back to the FedEx Cup Playoffs finale since 2018.

Ranked 25th in the FedEx Cup standings, Day will start the handicapped, $75million (A$116m) Tour Championship at one-under, nine shots behind leader and world No.1 Scottie Scheffler.

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Scheffler topped the season points race and thus earned a two-stroke lead over his nearest rival, Viktor Hovland, for the 30-player showdown, starting Friday morning (AEST).

But despite the advantage, Scheffler was among those who joined Jon Rahm in saying there must be a better way to determine the season’s best player than the handicap format — which is explained below.

“I wouldn’t say it’s the best format to identify the best golfer for the year,” said Scheffler, who is chasing a first FedEx Cup title along with Rahm.

“I mean, I get it. It’s made for TV. It may be more exciting for the fans to have this type of format. But as players it’s not the best identifier of who is playing the best throughout the year.”

Last week’s playoff winner at Olympia Fields, Hovland, is the closest starter to Scheffler at 8-under.

Defending champion Rory McIlroy opens on 7-under, Masters champion Rahm on 6-under and Memphis playoff winner Lucas Glover on 5-under with others gaining strokes based on season points.

The event winner is season champion, unlike the prior format, scrapped after 2018, where the points leader could lose the event but take the playoff crown.

“I don’t think it’s the best we can come up with,” Rahm said. “I did like the old format where, if you came in number one, you really rarely ever fell out of the top three.

“I thought that was a little bit better.”

The Spaniard sees it as the “easiest to understand” format but one that falls short.

“It feels like it’s more than just one week. It’s a culmination of a whole year,” Rahm said. “So it has a little bit of a different special feel to it.”

Scheffler was overtaken in last year’s final round by three-time FedEx Cup winner McIlroy, who is happy with the status quo.

“I certainly see the reasoning of trying to have it all one competition and not having ‘two’ winners. I do like it this way,” McIlroy said. “It gives the guys that have had the better years an advantage going into the week, which I think they should have.

“If anything, Scottie this year, he probably should have more of an advantage than a two-shot lead. But it makes it an exciting week if guys feel like they have a chance to win.”

PGA Tour insider Dan Rapaport offered up an alternative format to the Tour Championship, suggesting it should start as a stroke play event before changing to a match-play elimination.

He said the event should start as is so that the year’s best players are rewarded, before a halfway cut sets the field for two days of match play that decide the title.

“Simply making match play at the Tour Championship would become an accomplishment for the resume,” Rapaport said. “People would say, ‘Oh, this guy has made match play three of the past four years’.

“A single elimination tournament for $18 million (USD) … we can all get behind that.

“The FedEx Cup would then have a strong identity as not just the richest tournament but the match play tournament. Let’s make it happen.”

TOUR CHAMPIONSHIP — HOW IT WORKS

As for how it currently works, the FedEx Cup standings after the BMW Championship sets the starting scores for the top-30 players who qualify.

First place stands alone at the front of the field at 10-under, and the remaining 29 players have to catch him from scores ranging between eight-under (second-place) and even-par (places 26-30).

The player who finishes with the lowest score at the end of four rounds wins the Tour Championship and the season’s FedEx Cup.

In other words, a player can take the fewest amount of strokes to complete four rounds at East Lake, but not win the Tour Championship given they may not have overcome the deficit to a player who started with a bigger handicap.

The format was introduced to eliminate the confusion of having separate Tour Championship and FedEx Cup winners.

For example, in 2018 Tiger Woods won the Tour Championship and largely overshadowed the season triumph of Justin Rose.

Tour Championship handicap system based on FedEx Cup points