6 big names who won’t be at the Tour Championship

There’s only one more event left on the PGA Tour schedule in 2024 – but, for a number of big names, the season is already over.

Only the top-30 players on the FedEx Cup standings following the BMW Championship advance to this week’s Tour Championship.

Two-time major champion Justin Thomas has made it in by the skin of his teeth after sliding into the 30th and final place on the standings after a T30 finish at the BMW, whilst Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley went from ‘last man in’ at Castle Pines to fourth on the standings after his dramatic victory in Colorado.

Their delight, however, is in stark contrast to the disappointment of several of their peers who won’t get to peg it up at East Lake on Thursday.

Here are six notables whose season ended yesterday…

Brian Harman

The 2023 Open champion went into the BMW Championship ranked 29th on the FedEx Cup standings but finished 25th in Colorado to slip two spots to 31st to agonisingly miss out on the season finale.

Jason Day

The former world No.1’s season started promisingly enough with three top-ten finishes in his first five events. However, he managed only one in his next 14 – two if you include his T9 at the Olympics – and ultimately finished 32nd on the rankings. Next stop for the Aussie: the Presidents Cup.

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Will Zalatoris

On the plus-side, ‘Willy Z’ managed to remain healthy for the majority of the season after spending the last nine months of 2023 sidelined with a back injury. Missed cuts in each of his last three events of the regular season left him with a mountain to climb to reach East Lake. And so it proved.

Matt Fitzpatrick

The former US Open champion will feel aggrieved that a driver ruling went against him early in his final round but the damage to his season was done long before that. Fifth-place finishes at The PLAYERS and the Memorial were as good as it got for the Englishman, with a T10 at the Valero Texas Open the only other top-10 he managed from his 21 starts.

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Max Homa

A hugely disappointing 2024 for one of the stars of the 2023 Ryder Cup. Seventeen cuts made from 20 starts sounds encouraging but, like Fitzpatrick, he managed just three top-10s all season, the most recent of those coming at the Wells Fargo Championship in mid-May.

Nick Dunlap

If ever there was a sign that the current FedEx Cup system is flawed, this is surely it. Dunlap, a two-time winner on the PGA Tour this year (one of those as an amateur at The American Express in January) won’t feature at the Tour Championship. Whatever way you slice it and dice it, the optics of that are just plain weird.