Scottie Scheffler knows that despite the FedExCup race being described as a “season-long competition,” it can be boiled down to one tournament, one week, one result.
The Tour Championship.
That’s right: Even though he became the first PGA Tour player since 2009 to win six or more times in a season, and even though he’s the favorite for Player of the Year after claiming a green jacket and Olympic gold medal in the same year, Scheffler can – at most – take a two-shot lead into the Tour’s grand finale.
“I think it’s silly,” he said Wednesday at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, where he enters the week with more than a 1,900-point lead in the standings. “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 FedExCup because I had to withdraw from the last tournament? Is that really the season-long race? No. It is what it is.”
And Scheffler hasn’t changed his stance just because he’s now in this gilded position; he’s been the top seed entering the season finale each of the past two years. Last year, he called the Tour Championship a made-for-TV event that is “not the best identifier” of the top player that year.
“It’s a fun tournament,” Scheffler said Wednesday. “I don’t really consider it the season-long race like I think the way it’s called. But 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. 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.”
Scheffler is still looking to capture his first FedExCup title. He finished second in 2022 after blowing the lead with a final-round 73. Last year, feeling fatigued at the end of a long season in which he was eventually named the Tour’s Player of the Year, he shot just 1 under par across the four rounds and tied for sixth.
Over the past three years, he has shot a combined 13 under par there – a far cry from, say, Xander Schauffele, who is 43 under par at East Lake over the same span and now enters the postseason as the No. 2 seed.
East Lake underwent a recent restoration led by architect Andrew Green, with the finished product set to be on display in two weeks.
“I’m kind of excited they changed the course a little bit,” Scheffler said. “It may give me some new vibes around there.”