Why There’s No Perfect Format For FedEx Cup Playoffs

Scottie Scheffler was the best player on the PGA Tour this season.

There. It’s done. Written in stone. Truth has been told.

If he fails to win the FedEx Cup this week, those words won’t be any less accurate.

He just won’t be the FedEx Cup champion – and that’s alright.

We’ve been going through this end-of-season song-and-dance for close to two decades now, with various iterations of the points either rewarding pre-playoff success too much or too little, but rarely just right.

Well, spoiler alert: There is no Goldilocks.

The reality is, there’s no perfect format for these FedEx Cup playoffs because there’s no unified stance on what they really mean.

Even the best player over the first 46 tournaments, the man ranked No. 1, who will start this week leading by two strokes over the next-closest competitor and 10 over the bottom of the field, hasn’t completely bought into the inherent meaning of the final three tournaments.

“I think it’s silly,” Scheffler said recently. “You can’t call it a season-long race and have it come down to one tournament. Hypothetically, we get to East Lake and my neck flares up and it doesn’t heal the way it did at The Players, I finish 30th in the FedEx Cup because I had to withdraw from the last tournament? Is that really the season-long race? No. It is what it is.”

At least he got that last part right: It certainly is what it is – but more importantly, it’s not what it isn’t.

This isn’t supposed to be a reward for the player who played the best golf all season. For that, we have things like the Player of the Year award and the Jack Nicklaus Award and oh, a big pile of trophies and cash stacked into the many millions.

The obvious and most popular comparison, if we’re analogizing this to other sports’ finales, is the 2007 NFL season, when the New England Patriots went undefeated during the regular season and were clearly the best team, only to lose the Super Bowl to the New York Giants.

Sometimes, all is not fair in love, war and playoffs.

If the season is a marathon, this is a sprint to the finish line which sure as hell beats the alternative.

Fun fact: In 2006, the final year before the implementation of the FedEx Cup, the Tour Championship was contested during the first week of November. Tiger Woods, who led the PGA Tour that season in wins and money earned and easily claimed the POY award, skipped that tournament because, well, it didn’t mean anything.

If nothing else, we can agree that what we have now (something) is better than what we had before (nothing).

The debates don’t end there, of course. Plenty of observers will blanch at the staggered scoring start, which is an admittedly gimmicky way of attempting to offer “home-field advantage” to certain players. Others will insist that match play is the way to go, though it would be a fool’s errand to try and convince big-money investors in the product that America is clamoring for a format that could leave viewers watching Taylor Pendrith compete against Christiaan Bezuidenhout for four hours on a Sunday afternoon.

Therein lies the biggest problem. Sponsors, rights holders, players and fans all want something different – and most can’t even agree amongst themselves.

“You’ve got to figure out a way to strike a balance between it being a good TV product and it still being a season-long race,” Scheffler continued. “Right now, I don’t know exactly how the ratings are or anything like that, but I know for a fact you can’t really quite call it the season-long race when it comes down to one stroke play tournament on the same golf course each year.”

Consider the current format an imperfect solution. It might not completely please everyone with a vested interest, but it can at least placate most of us.

This week’s winner will receive a whopping $25 million and a nice shiny trophy. He will forever be the FedEx Cup champion, but if his name isn’t Scottie Scheffler, he will not have been the best player on the PGA Tour in 2024.

Silly or not, that’s the way playoffs are supposed to work.