Tour Championship format a talking point for McIlroy, others

ATLANTA — Unlike many PGA Tour golfers, Masters champion Rory McIlroy didn’t hate the starting-strokes format used at the Tour Championship the past six seasons.

Under the format that was introduced in 2019, the FedEx Cup points leader started the season-ending event at 10 under, at least two strokes ahead of everyone else in the field. The No. 2 player in points started at 8 under, No. 3 at 7 under, No. 4 at 6 under and so on.

Even world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, who captured his first FedEx Cup after starting at 10 under in 2024, called the playoff format “silly.”

This year, all 30 golfers in the field at East Lake Golf Club will start at even par in a traditional 72-hole tournament.

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“I’m maybe part of the minority,” McIlroy said Tuesday. “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. But the majority of people just didn’t like the starting strokes, whether it were players or fans.”

Given as well as Scheffler has played this season — he won for the fifth time at last week’s BMW Championship and captured his third and fourth majors at the PGA Championship and The Open — McIlroy said a two-stroke advantage on the field probably wouldn’t have been enough.

“You could also argue if it was starting strokes this week, Scottie with a two-shot lead, it probably isn’t enough considering what he’s done this year and the lead that he has in the FedEx Cup going into this week,” he said.

The PGA Tour reallocated its bonus pool to reward golfers who performed well in the regular season. Scheffler has already collected $23 million in bonuses this year, including $10 million for finishing first in the points standings before the playoffs, $8 million from the Comcast Business Tour top 10 and $5 million for leading in points after the BMW Championship.

There is an additional $40 million on the line at East Lake this week, including $10 million to the winner.

Scheffler will attempt to become the first back-to-back winner of the FedEx Cup.

“I’m sure everybody aside from Scottie Scheffler loves the fact that we’re all starting on a level playing field,” England’s Tommy Fleetwood said. “It’s probably more exciting for the players to come here, everybody on a level field, knowing it’s an unbelievable opportunity to have a great week, win the tournament and obviously leave here unbelievably happy.”

When the PGA Tour announced the changes in May, Scheffler said the goal was to make the Tour Championship the “hardest tournament to qualify for” and the FedEx Cup trophy “the most difficult to win.”

Justin Thomas, the 2017 FedEx Cup champion, said eliminating starting strokes gives more golfers in the field a chance to win.

“It has the opportunity to be an unbelievable week in the sense [that] you could have 15, 20 guys that have a chance to win on Sunday, which is pretty cool,” Thomas said. “That’s awesome, but it’s more of just playing the tournament. I think with the starting strokes, it was very, very dependent on where you were.

“More often than not, other than a handful of guys, your week was pretty quickly determined [by] not the first nine holes, but your first day. If you’re starting at say 2 or 3 under or less, and you don’t go shoot 4 or 5 under the first day, then you pretty much don’t have a chance to win anymore.”

The PGA Tour described this season’s Tour Championship as a “bridge year,” meaning additional changes could be coming soon. The tour has explored the idea of rotating the tournament at other golf courses, as well as a match-play bracket to determine the season-long champion.

“There was a lot of other stuff on the table,” McIlroy said. “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. I think it’s just hard for the players to reconcile that we play stroke play for every week of the year but then the season-ending tournament is going to be decided by match play. I think it was just hard for the players to get their heads around that.”