Tour star lays into FedEx Cup format, explains why he ‘fundamentally disagrees’ with Rory McIlroy

It seems everyone has an opinion on the FedEx Cup-ending Tour Championship. Notably, the format. 

If you don’t know, the top 30 in the season-long standings head to East Lake and begin the tournament on a pre-determined handicap score from 10-under for the leader down to even-par for those at the bottom end. It derives from the American obsession that all sporting calendars must end with a playoff system that sees one player or team rewarded for an end-of-year burst of form.

And it has seen the PGA Tour come under some fire from fans, pundits and stars alike. Indeed, Scottie Scheffler, despite heading home from Atlanta $25 million richer than when he arrived a few days prior, described the process as “silly”.

It means that, with that FedEx Cup jackpot, the $10 million Comcast bonus, and prize money, Scheffler has banked just north of $62 million in the past eight months.

Good work if you can get it and all that.

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And speaking on his podcast, The Chipping Forecast, which he co-presents with esteemed broadcasters Andrew Cotter and Iain Carter, Eddie Pepperell described it as “nonsense”.

The DP World Tour star added: “It’s just entirely meaningless. One wonders why we are playing this game. And it is a game, let’s be honest. What LIV and the PGA Tour are playing is purely game theoretic type stuff.

“And the way you can tell that is no one really wants the outcome and yet it seems like our only choice is to have the outcome we’ve got.

“It’s crazy, and the game will end up losing. I think there will end up being a pretty catastrophic, at some point, coming down to reality.”

Scheffler’s season has seen him not only win a second Masters, a second Players, and second Arnold Palmer Invitational, but an RBC Heritage, Memorial and Travelers too. And while he carded the third best score at the Tour Championship – two back of Collin Morikawa and one behind Sahith Theegala – thanks to the handicap system, the world number one added a seventh PGA Tour title of the year and 14th overall to his CV.

“I just felt sorry for the tournament,” Pepperell continued. “If the tournament had have existed on its own two feet, as such, it would have actually been quite an entertaining finish, because Morikawa, Theegala and Scheffler were all on a similar score.

“The tournament is entirely in service to the season-long race, which is crazy because the FedEx Cup – as an order of merit, by definition – means the whole season is in service to that, and that’s how it should be.”

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The two-time DP World Tour champion then turned his attentions to Rory McIlroy, who in February described his vision of a future that saw golf be more like football’s Champions League, which would see a top-level tour of just 80 players with other circuits feeding into that.

Pepperell, though, is having none of it.

“This is why I fundamentally disagree with people like Rory who quite often pertain the importance of entertainment.

“Well, you can’t keep catering to a society that finds one thing entertaining this minute and something else the next minute, because in the end you end up where we are, which is entirely lost with a very gimmicky format.

“And I think it would just be wise for the PGA Tour to go back to something that resembles something we all value – and that is merit. And the season-long race should be based purely on merit.

“And if Scottie Scheffler wins that three weeks out, that is the thing we celebrate, because that is what success looks like.”

You can’t help but feel we’ll all still be having this same argument this time next year.

We also talked about the Tour Championship on the latest episode of The bunkered Podcast – so make sure you listen to that to get our take on matters from East Lake.

Alex Perry is the Associate Editor of bunkered. A journalist for more than 20 years, he has been a golf industry stalwart for the majority of his career and, in a five-year spell at ESPN, covered every sporting event you can think of. He completed his own Grand Slam at the 2023 Masters, having fallen in love with the sport at his hometown club of Okehampton and on the links of nearby Bude & North Cornwall.

Associate Editor