Why you won’t see Rory McIlroy at the FedEx Cup Playoffs opener

Rory McIlroy is staying true to his word from last year and will not take part in next week’s FedEx Cup Playoffs opener.

The commitment list (based on last week’s FedEx Cup standings) for next week’s FedEx St. Jude Classic, the first of three playoff events to end the PGA Tour regular season, is out, and McIlroy’s name is not on it.

McIlroy’s decision to skip the first event of the playoffs doesn’t really mean much for his chances at the FedEx Cup title as he’s guaranteed to make the Tour Championship at East Lake regardless of his results in Memphis or the following week’s BMW Championship. McIlroy is second in the standings after three wins, including the Masters, earlier this season and he’s nearly 850 points ahead of Sepp Straka in third place.

Of the top 70 players in the standings who qualify for the Playoffs, McIlroy, who hasn’t played since a T7 at last month’s Open Championship, is the only player opting to skip the opener.

The now-grand slam winner opened with a 68 last year at TPC Southwind only to back up the rest of the week and finish T68 (second to last), but only saw his season-long ranking in the FedEx Cup drop from third to fifth. Late last year, he told the UK Telegraph that he would “probably not play” in the playoff opener this season, as he intended to scale back his schedule.

“I’ll probably not play the first play-off event in Memphis,” McIlroy told the Telegraph in November. “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.”

In that interview, McIlroy also called out the Cognizant Classic, Valero Texas Open and RBC Heritage as events he played in 2024 that he likely wouldn’t in 2025 and all three events didn’t make his schedule this season. Assuming McIlroy plays both the BMW and Tour Championships, he will make 16 starts on Tour this season, three fewer than a year ago after he added the Texas Children’s Houston Open to his schedule for the first time since 2014.

McIlroy also hasn’t fared too well in his career at TPC Southwind.

His best finish came in 2023 when he shot a final-round 65 to earn a solo third-place finish, but he missed the cut the year before that in the event’s first as a Playoff event. He has never won in Memphis in eight tries.

There is also a precedent for McIlroy skipping the first event of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, although this is the first time he’s done it since the playoffs were truncated from four events to three. He opted out of The Northern Trust in 2018 and the Barclays in 2015.

This is the first year of the PGA Tour’s new FedEx Cup bonus structure, which places much more emphasis on the regular season, as opposed to allocating bonuses based on the Tour Championship results. Based on his second-place position in the FedEx Cup standings, McIlroy is already set to earn $4 million based on finishing the regular season in second and an additional $6 million from the Comcast Business Top 10.