The player who would have won the Tour Championship if the format had been matchplay instead of strokeplay

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There has been much debate regarding the best way for the PGA Tour to ensure that the Tour Championship provides an exciting end to the season.

The PGA Tour moved away from having starting strokes at the Tour Championship this season and reverted to a system whereby all 30 players began on a level playing field.

Before the tournament began at East Lake, Scottie Scheffler said matchplay at the Tour Championship would be a bad idea.

Justin Thomas said the majority of PGA Tour players were happy with the new Tour Championship format.

But what would things have been like at East Lake, had the Tour decided to go down a different route?

If matchplay was the format used for the Tour Championship, the top 30 on the FedEx Cup points list would have all been seeded accordingly.

For the format to work, only 24 players would have qualified for the PGA Tour season finale, with the top eight players receiving byes through to the last 16.

Here is how things would have shaped up, had the PGA Tour decided to go with a matchplay format at East Lake.

Who would’ve won the Tour Championship if the format had been matchplay

Obviously matchplay is completely different to strokeplay, so we have to use the players’ scores in each round as the barometer.

Due to the top eight seeds receiving a bye, Corey Conners would have faced Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas would have gone head-to-head with Sam Burns, we’d have seen Cam Young take on Hideki Matsuyama and an all European clash between Ludvig Aberg and Robert MacIntyre.

On the other side of the draw, the match-ups would have been Maverick McNealy vs Brian Harman, Harris English vs Shane Lowry, Andrew Novak vs Nick Taylor and Keegan Bradley vs Patrick Cantlay.

From all of those matches, Morikawa would have progressed to face Scottie Scheffler, Thomas would have booked a match against Tommy Fleetwood, Cam Young would have faced Sepp Straka and MacIntyre would have come up against his former Ryder Cup partner Justin Rose.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the draw, we would have seen Harman take on Rory McIlroy, English face Ben Griffin, Taylor line up against Russell Henley and finally a match-up between Cantlay and J.J. Spaun.

The results of those matches would have left us with some really interesting quarter-final clashes.

The four matches would have been Scheffler vs Fleetwood, MacIntyre vs Young, McIlroy vs English and Henley vs Cantlay.

This is where it would have got very interesting. Fleetwood would have knocked out Scheffler, while Young, English and Cantlay would have progressed through to the semi-finals.

The popular 34-year-old from Southport, England, would have then beaten his American counterpart, Young, while Cantlay would have progressed from his clash with English.

Fleetwood would have then beaten Cantlay in the final after his round of 68 on Sunday bettered the American’s by three strokes.

So the good news is that the eventual winner of the tournament would have been the same in both strokeplay and matchplay formats.

However, a big problem would have emerged if the PGA Tour did decide to go with the knockout format.

The main reason why matchplay is not the way forward at the Tour Championship

The fact that we would have been left with a final four of Fleetwood, Young, Cantlay and English says it all really.

It certainly doesn’t scream ‘box-office’, does it?

With the golfing landscape having completely changed since the formation of LIV Golf in 2022, it’s now more important than ever for the PGA Tour to produce a product that excites the fans.

Coincidentally, LIV’s Team Championship finale worked out perfectly for them, with Bryson DeChambeau’s Crushers facing Jon Rahm’s Legion XIII in a play-off.

The PGA Tour have to find a system whereby their superstars are in the mix to win the Tour Championship on Sunday.

The harsh truth of the matter is that the only way to ensure that happens is to stick with the starting stroke system that was banished this season.

Many of the players seemed to be against the idea of the handicap system but without it, the PGA Tour risk having their main men missing from the leaderboard in their showpiece season finale at the Tour Championship.

And they quite simply cannot afford to allow that to happen.