At least for this year, the 30 players who advanced to the Tour Championship this week in Atlanta are starting from scratch. No FedEx Cup points were carried over, and no player will get a head start over any other.
Asked Tuesday if getting rid of the “starting strokes” arrangement left the PGA Tour with the “best format” for its season championship, Rory McIlroy merely said it’s the format they have for this week.
“I’m maybe part of the minority. I didn’t hate the starting strokes,” Northern Ireland’s McIlroy told reporters at East Lake Golf Club. “I thought that the player that played the best during the course of the season should have had an advantage coming in here. But the majority of people just didn’t like the starting strokes.”
McIlroy sat on the player advisory committee that sorted out what to do about the often confusing Tour Championship format. In May, the tour announced that it was eliminating starting strokes, calling the move “an important first step in the evolution of our postseason.”
McIlroy said it was done with the fans in mind, though he also can hear the argument that Scottie Scheffler, who finished the points race a runaway No. 1, may deserve more than a two-stroke head start as he’s gotten in years prior.
Then McIlroy revealed that the PAC discussed match play among its several options to further evolve the Tour Championship.
“Look, there was a lot of other stuff on the table. Match play was on the table, and that got canned for this year,” McIlroy said. “That might be brought back up in the conversation for next year or the year after.
“I think it’s just hard for the players to reconcile that we play stroke play for every week of the year but then the season-ending tournament is going to be decided by match play. I think it was just hard for the players to get their heads around that.”
The PGA Tour had one official match-play event from 1999-2023, after which the WGC Match Play was squeezed off the schedule.
Though many argue that a match-play bracket only determines the best golfer of the week, not the best golfer of the year, McIlroy won the 2015 WGC Match Play as the No. 1 overall seed. Former World No. 1 Dustin Johnson did the same in 2017, and Scheffler pulled out a victory in 2022 as the fifth overall seed.
Golf Digest on Tuesday laid out a mock match play bracket that would give the top eight seeds, including Scheffler and No. 2 McIlroy, a first-round bye as a reward for their season-long excellence, not unlike first-round byes for top seeds in the NFL playoffs.
“I don’t know, maybe that will be on the table again, who knows,” McIlroy said of match play. “Yeah, look, it’s a 72-hole stroke-play event, and that’s what we play week in and week out. That’s what’s going to determine the winner.”
The FedEx Cup was introduced in 2007, and McIlroy has won the most of anyone with three (2016, 2019, 2022). He’s gearing up to try for a fourth, and he doesn’t mind starting out the week without an advantage over the 30th golfer in the field.
“I don’t think I ever started this tournament in the starting strokes era at 10 under, like in the No. 1 spot,” he said. “If anything, I’m in a better position than I have been the last few years, so that’s a nice thing.
“But no, I think with the format change or with whatever the money is, we’re still playing for the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup, and that’s enough to play as hard as possible for.”
–Field Level Media
