While the golfing world is still waiting to see what the long-term future looks like for the Tour Championship on the PGA Tour, it has now been confirmed that changes are coming ahead of the 2025 event.
The Tour Championship has been problematic for the PGA Tour for a number of years. What should be the showpiece finale to the regular season has often turned into a damp squib of an event.
Since 2019, the Tour Championship has seen the player leading the FedEx Cup start the week at East Lake on 10 under par, with everyone else in the field starting on a score of between eight under par and even par.
Unfortunately for the PGA Tour, the 2024 event seemed to force their hand to make changes, with Scottie Scheffler expressing his frustration with the format.
Smylie Kaufman discusses the change to the Tour Championship
Scheffler obviously deserved to start the week with more than a two-shot lead. However, giving the world number one a two-shot lead also helped ensure that it was such an underwhelming tournament for viewers.
So it is no surprise that changes are set to be made. It has been announced that 2025 will see no staggered starting scores. Meanwhile, East Lake is set to be set up in a way which makes scoring more challenging.
Interestingly, speaking on The Smylie Show, Smylie Kaufman had mixed feelings about the incoming changes. Meanwhile, he shared what he had also heard about the plans for the playoffs as a whole.
“What I do like, I like the starting strokes going away, so there is a part of me that is a fan of this. It’s going to be much easier to digest. I don’t necessarily agree with number 30 having the same opportunity as number one at the Tour Championship,” he said.
“I know I’ve been an advocate for making the playoffs seem different from the regular season. But it’s the season-long race for the FedEx Cup, why are we even accumulating points to the Tour Championship – what advantage did anybody have? Is it just getting to the Tour Championship? Well, if that’s the case, then guess what, why should anybody play in Memphis or the BMW?”
“What I found out is that the purse that these guys are going to play for, the big, grand prize, what was $25 million that you would win for the Tour Championship, is that the big number that it’s been? That number’s going to be cut down, and it’s going to be percentage rollouts that are going to happen after Memphis and BMW and after the Tour Championship, so based on where you are heading into those weeks [decides the payout] is how I thought I understand it. Because what they’re trying to do is make it to where Scottie and Rory feel like they have to play before East Lake.”
What Rory McIlroy said about his plans for the FedEx Cup playoffs in 2025
As Kaufman notes, it would be a big blow for the PGA Tour and the FedEx Cup if the likes of Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy felt able to skip a playoff event.
McIlroy has already suggested that he is considering skipping the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis after struggling last year and not really falling too far down the standings.
“There’s a few tournaments that I played this year that I don’t usually play and that I might not play next year,” McIlroy told Telegraph Sport in 2024. “Like, I played the Cognizant [Classic] in Palm Beach Gardens, [the Texas Open in] San Antonio and the [RBC Heritage in] Hilton Head. And I’ll probably not play the first play-off event in Memphis. I mean, I finished basically dead last there this year [tied for 68 in a 70-man field], and only moved down one spot in the play-off standings.”
Of course, McIlroy is in a place now where many of his main goals centre around events not on the regular PGA Tour calendar. So dangling the carrot of not winning the FedEx Cup may not have too much of an impact on the Northern Irishman.
But it would surely be good for the PGA Tour as a whole if every single playoff event had the same prestige as The Players Championship. And raising the stakes will definitely help with that.
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