Professional golf has an avid following, and the PGA Tour offers fans the opportunity to watch the very best players work their craft on the very best courses around the nation. That is why it is so disappointing to see the winner’s title of the FedEx Cup and Tour Championship go to the golfer who performed the best over the final four rounds of the final tournament of the season; the choice of winner didn’t take into account how they performed across the entire tournament schedule.

Scottie Scheffler was clearly the best golfer this season. He won five tournaments, including two majors, and finished in the top 10 in 16 of the 19 tournaments in which he competed. He also lapped the entire field with 7,456 Fed Cup points, besting Rory McIlroy’s very respectable 3,687 points.

In the current format, labeling the FedEx Cup winner as the tour champion devalues a season’s worth of play. If the only benefit of the entire season’s accumulation of FedEx points is to determine who will make the final 30 golfers, then a superb season can be lost in one bad tournament or perhaps even one bad round in the final weekend.

This is not to detract from Tommy Fleetwood winning his first PGA Tour tournament. He is the feel-good story of the final tournament of the season. Hopefully this will lift him up to future PGA Tour tournament wins, which he is certainly capable of achieving.

There are no other professional team sports that pit all teams against each other simultaneously. Best-of-five or -seven brackets are the norm. Professional tennis is also played through a single elimination bracket. The only sport that has a similar full field competition is professional bowling. Yet the winner of each tournament is eventually determined by a single-elimination step-ladder format.

Separating the FedEx Cup winner from the FedEx point standings may serve to add some suspense around the final three FedEx tournaments, which is used to draw sponsors and viewers. Yet it distorts what is being played for: namely, three tournaments with a single winner determined, not the FedEx point standings leader.

There is no one best way to design tournaments to determine the very best player or team. That is why upsets occur, which adds excitement to the events and keeps fans watching. Fleetwood’s victory was well earned and well deserved. Yet no one can honestly say that he was the season’s best golfer.

The handicap system used from 2019 through 2024 tried to reward a full season of play with bonus strokes in the final tournament. This, too, seemed too orchestrated, with the 30th golfer beginning with a 10-stroke deficit even before the first drive on the first hole was made. It also removed some of the drama of the final event, given that the golfer with the most top FedEx points also earned the most stroke bonuses, making them even more likely to be victorious.

The solution is to make the final three tournaments a stand-alone event, with qualification based on the FedEx points, as it is now. The difference is awarding FedEx points based on all these tournaments, not just the first two, and then use the final tally of points to determine the winner of the FedEx Cup and the Tour Championship. This may indeed be the winner of the final tournament. It may also be someone else who finished near the top of the final tournament but had performed spectacularly throughout the entire season. In such a case, Scheffler would have been the FedEx Cup winner this year, even though he tied for fourth at East Lake.

Designing tournaments that are fair to the player, but also create excitement for fans, is not easy. Professional golf, like all professional sports, is big-business entertainment, which requires large infusions of money to keep sponsors and fans engaged. Making the final tournament a winner-take-all for the Tour Championship is inconsistent with the season’s focus on FedEx point accumulation and standings.

The new format appears to be a work in process, with future changes almost certain to come. In an ideal world, taking some of the focus off the money and onto the competition would go a long way to improving the ending of the PGA Tour season. In the real world, the money trumps the competition.

Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a computer science professor in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A data scientist, he uses his expertise to address issues in public policy and explore sports analytics.

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https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/29/opinion-pga-tour-confusion-fedex-cup/