Unpacking changes Rolapp wants for PGA Tour
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USA Today
39 minutes ago
- USA Today
PGA money list 2025: Top 10 golfers based on season prize money, earnings
Several professional golfers have achieved success throughout 2025, earning substantial prize money along the way. American Scottie Scheffler earned the top spot with five victories and nearly $24 million in earnings throughout his 73 rounds of play this year. Scheffler is currently ranked as the World's No. 1 golfer and won the PGA Championship and The Open Championship, among others, this year. Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland and J.J. Spaun of the United States were also among the top earners for the year. Here's who ranks among the top 10 earners this year. Golf season money list: Who are the top 10 golf earners? The full list of golf earners can be found on the PGA Tour website. Who is among the lowest golf earners? Jason Dufner earned the smallest amount of money for the year, at $7,800. Garrick Higgo has the lowest amount of earnings ($1,012,783) among those who have at least one tournament victory. He won the Corales Puntacana Championship in the Dominican Republic back in April.
New York Times
41 minutes ago
- New York Times
The Tour Championship has changed, again. The PGA Tour may not be done either
ATLANTA — Should the Tour Championship be about rewarding a season-long champion, or should it try to be a marquee golf tournament? At the core of two decades of debate and constant format changes is this simple question. Is the PGA Tour's FedEx Cup playoffs culminating event a reflection of the previous eight months or a standalone event that ranks among the better titles in golf? Is this akin to European soccer, or more like American professional sports, where the best man that week wins? Advertisement The best golfer in the world cautions people to stop thinking that way. 'People love the comparisons to other sports, but golf is simply not like other sports,' Scottie Scheffler said Wednesday. 'I'm just going to leave it at that.' For the better part of 20 years, the PGA Tour has been trying to live inside both worlds. Goofy. Silly. Confusing. All words used by the game's top stars to describe all the different formats used to crown a tour champ. Now the Tour Championship tees off Thursday in yet another iteration after a player-led movement sparked a midseason shift. Oh, and even this change could be gone in a year. But this week, there is no confusion. No advantages or algorithms. At least for this season, the Tour Championship is simply a 72-hole, 30-man tournament at East Lake Golf Club with $40 million at stake. While seemingly nobody agrees on any perfect solution, the overwhelming majority of players are just happy the starting stroke era is over. Have we considered that Tommy Fleetwood has been running a 10-year bit that concludes with him being season-long Tour Champion the first year we move back away from starting strokes? — Brody Miller (@BrodyAMiller) August 19, 2025 How we got here: The PGA Tour created a playoff system in 2007 called the FedEx Cup, in which the highest point earners during the normal season qualified for a final few tournaments, all trying to play their way to the Tour Championship and monster bonus checks. From 2007 to 2018, if any of the top five point earners from the season won the Tour Championship, they won the FedEx Cup. But if the final tournament was won by someone who started the week outside the top five, there were two champions, as happened in 2018 when Tiger Woods won the Tour Championship but Justin Rose was the FedEx Cup champion. Confusing, we know. Advertisement So starting the next year, the tour got creative. It wanted the Tour Championship to be a competitive golf tournament where the winner is the season champion and gives a proper advantage to those who had been the best all year. Insert the starting strokes era, in which the No. 1 golfer in the standings began the tournament at 10 under par and Nos. 26-30 were at even par, with everyone else somewhere in between. It wasn't all bad. It had a few captivating finishes, and often the golfer starting with the lead didn't win, which helped the drama but hurt the 'season champion' argument. The problem was nobody knew what to do with it. What did it really mean? By trying to check both boxes, it achieved neither. 'Starting strokes was tough just because we don't play any tournaments like that,' Patrick Cantlay said, 'and so it was kind of — it felt goofy from a competitive point of view.' Rickie Fowler said, 'That was always confusing because you always had a regular tournament going on. Meanwhile, there was the staggered start, and you had guys who actually won the tournament for world ranking points while there was something else.' 'I'm maybe part of the minority,' Rory McIlroy said. 'I didn't hate the starting strokes. I thought that the player that played the best during the course of the season should have had an advantage coming in here.' So in a shift primarily led by players, the PGA Tour is trying out a new messaging: Make the Tour Championship the hardest event to qualify for in golf. From there, just try to make it a marquee event. The best thing in the tour's corner is that the player seemingly most hurt by the change is its most outspoken supporter. Scheffler is atop the standings for the fourth-straight year, and therefore most disadvantaged by the change. He's also the one who wants winning the Tour Championship to matter. Advertisement Speaking multiple times over the last three weeks, Scheffler has primarily argued that golf is not a sport conducive to one big championship. The big picture of the season will tell you who was the best, and greatness is determined by who wins the toughest tournaments. 'If you're going to have a true season-long race where truly the best player every year wins, odds are it's not going to come to that interesting of a conclusion in most years,' Scheffler said. 'I think most years it's pretty obvious who the Player of the Year is going to be.' Four tournaments a year already stand above the rest — the majors — and the winners of those tournaments are often remembered above all others. The Players Championship, to a lesser extent, carries weight. Scheffler argues that golf has never really been about honoring longevity and consistency. 'In our sport, in order to accomplish what you want to accomplish, you have to play good golf at the right time,' he continued. 'If you want to win major championships, you have to play great golf in major championship weeks. If I want to win the FedEx Cup this year, I have to have a great week.' So if the obsession with finding the 'correct' season-long champion is over, the next mission is finding the best version of this level playing field. The Athletic's Ian O'Connor penned an interesting pitch this summer, suggesting all points should go out the window in the playoffs. The first tournament is where the top-50 scores advance to the next round. Then, the top 30 golfers the next week make it to the Tour Championship. A true playoff like other sports. It's a concept McIlroy parroted last week as a potentially good idea. The counter to that is sponsors and executives will bristle at any format in which Scheffler or McIlroy could have one bad week and miss the final. But McIlroy also hasn't ruled out the match play idea, saying Tuesday: 'Match play was on the table, and that got canned for this year. That might be brought back up in the conversation for next year or the year after.' Many golf fans clamor for some sort of match play format, which no longer exists on the PGA Tour in any other tournament. Several reports indicated broadcast partners opposed the idea, as match play can be difficult to cover and can lead to dull stretches or blowouts. Advertisement Scheffler, speaking the morning after McIlroy, put match play down quickly. 'The reality is we've had a match play tournament for a number of years,' he said. 'We had a match play tournament for four or five years in one of the biggest growing markets in the country, and that tournament still didn't succeed. I don't think match play is the best way to crown a season-long champion, and I think changing the format for your last tournament is kind of quite silly.' The timing of this discussion is fitting, with new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp clamoring for 'significant change' and a 'holistic relook' at the entire competitive model. He's launched a new Future Competition Committee, chaired by Woods with six PGA Tour players and three business executives like John Henry and Theo Epstein. 'I don't think fans should expect anything we're doing now to exist in perpetuity in general,' Rolapp said Wednesday. So what might change? While everything is on the table, from rotating venues to different formats, Scheffler said one focus for players is honing in on that message of 'the hardest event to qualify for in golf.' He wants an improved points system, with points for winning the first two legs of the playoffs — the FedEx St. Jude Championship and BMW Championship — brought more in line with signature events. OK, so is Sunday's winner actually the FedEx Cup champ or just the winner of a big tournament? 'If you're at the Tour Championship, then you have all the right in the world to walk away with the FedEx Cup,' Justin Thomas said. It's why Scheffler eloquently disagreed with a question on whether it would be invalid for a golfer to win it who hadn't won a tournament all season. Scheffler's argument is that for somebody to make it to Atlanta without winning means they played really good golf all year long. Shane Lowry had nine top 20s and four top 10s. Corey Conners had 10 top 20s and five top 10s. Tommy Fleetwood has been so good this year that he's No. 5 in the standings without a win. Advertisement Fleetwood, though, has become a hot topic as he's gone nearly a decade in the U.S. without winning a single PGA Tour event, a statistical anomaly considering he has more than 40 top-5 finishes in that time. Fleetwood's first PGA Tour win this week would crown him as the season champ. 'I think it would be pretty funny,' Fleetwood said. But the most unexpected lesson of the week was the toll that starting strokes placed on Scheffler. As his caddie Ted Scott put it to him, the hardest thing in golf is sleeping on a lead, and Scheffler essentially slept on the Tour Championship lead for eight months a year for three years. His not winning it was considered a failure, and that bugged him. 'It just irked me so bad finishing off the year where guys were like, 'Hey, great playing, I'm sorry about how it ended,'' he recalled. 'It's like, you know what, man? I won the Masters this year, won a few other tournaments. It was a pretty good year.' What Scheffler clearly wants is for winning the Tour Championship to be an accomplishment, not an assumed result of the previous eight months. Whether you like it or not, we get four days of golf at East Lake with the 30 best players on tour this season. We don't know if this will work in the long run. We don't even know if it will be around in a year. But for now, it's the Tour Championship. 'I don't know if it's the best format,' McIlroy said, 'but it's the one that we have for this week.' (Top photo of Scottie Scheffler: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images) Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
FedEx Cup preview: Top 30 on points list gather at East Lake to settle the 2025 championship
After 38 tournaments in eight months, the PGA Tour's FedEx Cup season comes down to four days in Atlanta at the East Lake Golf Club to settle the championship Aug. 21-24. And for all that Scottie Scheffler has done — five victories, two major championships, more than $23 million in earnings and a lead of nearly 4,000 points over second-place Rory McIlroy — he doesn't have any more of an advantage over the 30th-place player in the field, Akshay Bhatia. Except, of course, momentum. Scottie Scheffler is on a Tiger-like roll Scheffler's victory in the BMW Championship on Aug. 17, in which he rallied from four shots behind Robert MacIntyre to start the day, was his 13th top-10 finish in a row since tying for 20th at The Players Championship. Nine of them have been top-fives. But with the controversial "Starting Strokes" format summarily tossed out at mid-season, any of the 30 players in the field can capture lightning in a bottle for four days at East Lake and come away with the season title and a $10 million bonus (which doesn't count towards official money). It's also a departure from the old system from 2007-2018 when there were still a graduated amount of points awarded to the top finishers at East Lake, which led to the awkward situation four times where the FedEx Cup champion did not win the Tour Championship, including the last two years of that format when Tiger Woods and Xander Schauffele won the tournament but Justin Rose and Justin Thomas won the FedEx Cup. What's the format for this week's Tour Championship? That's easy: the winner at 72 holes wins the FedEx Cup. No starting strokes. No need to keep a running total of projected points. The low guy wins and walks away with the season championship and $10 million. How to watch the Tour Championship on TV Golf Channel: Aug. 21-22, 1-6 p.m.; Aug. 23, 1-2:30 p.m.; Aug. 24, 12-1:30 p.m. NBC: Aug. 23, 2:30-7 p.m.; Aug. 24, 1:30-6 p.m. ESPN+: Aug. 21, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Aug. 22, 11:15 a.m.-6 p.m.; Aug. 23, 12-7 p.m.; Aug. 24, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Fubo: NBC, Golf Channel available. Top Tour Championship contenders Scottie Scheffler: We could point out that he plays well at East Lake but at this point, he'd play well in a parking lot. Rory McIlroy: One of four players in the field who has won at East Lake, the only one who has done it multiple times. Russell Henley: Of the four former Georgia Bulldogs in the field, Henley has the best record with two top-five finishes. Tour Championship field Ranked by FedEx Cup points 1. Scottie Scheffler 7456 2. Rory McIlroy 3687 3. J.J. Spaun 3493 4. Justin Rose 3326 5. Tommy Fleetwood 2923 6. Ben Griffin 2798 7. Russell Henley 2795 8. Sepp Straka 2783 9. Robert MacIntyre 2750 10. Maverick McNealy 2547 11. Harris English 2512 12. Justin Thomas 2477 13. Cameron Young 2184 14. Ludvig Åberg 2179 15. Andrew Novak 2030 16. Keegan Bradley 1992 17. Sam Burns 1871 18. Brian Harman 1735 19. Corey Conners 1719 20. Patrick Cantlay 1661 21. Collin Morikawa 1655 22. Viktor Hovland 1637 23. Hideki Matsuyama 1630 24. Shane Lowry 1607 25. Nick Taylor 1564 26. Harry Hall 1475 27. Jacob Bridgeman 1475 28. Sungjae Im 1422 29. Chris Gotterup 1414 30. Akshay Bhatia 1409 This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: FedEx Cup preview: Scottie Scheffler leads field of 30 at East Lake
