Scottie Scheffler showed up for the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis this week with his Olympic gold medal but he wasn’t exactly showing it off.
“It’s a bit heavy around the neck,” he told members of the media during his pre-tournament interview on Wednesday. “I brought it for a deal this morning, and I promptly put it back in my backpack.”
Scheffler’s victory in Paris was his seventh of the year, though there were no FedEx Cup points awarded for this one. Never mind, he has plenty. Scheffler enters the FedEx Cup playoffs this week with 5,993 points, or double the amount earned by every other competitor on the PGA Tour other than Xander Schauffele.
Nevertheless, his lead will be winnowed to a two-stroke head start over his closest competitor heading into the 72-hole Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, the final of three legs in the playoffs. That is should Scheffler remain on top with points worth quadruple for the next two weeks. (A win that was worth 500 points is suddenly worth 2,000.)
It has Scheffler questioning how fair the season-long points race really is.
“I think it’s silly,” he said. “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 FedEx Cup because I had to withdraw from the last tournament? Is that really the season-long race? No. It is what it is.”
He added: “It’s a fun tournament. 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.”
This is the 18th year of the FedEx Cup and it has been tweaked several times. In 2008, Vijay Singh had clinched the title based on the then point structure without needing to play the final tournament, which made for bad TV ratings. Scheffler said that scenario would be great for him but understood it would be a ratings dud. He’s held the lead going into the Tour finale the last two years but hasn’t come out on top as Rory McIlroy and Viktor Hovland have tracked him down. This has been Scheffler’s most dominant season but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Schauffele, winner of two majors, could edge Scheffler for Player of the Year honors should he win the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup.
“I don’t really think about exclamation point or anything like that, but definitely want to win the FedExCup,” Scheffler said. “It’s quoted as the season-long race, but at the end of the day it really all comes down to East Lake. I didn’t have my best stuff at East Lake the last couple years. I played good there my rookie year, but outside of that, the last few years I haven’t had my best stuff. I’m kind of excited that they changed the course a little bit. It may give me some new vibes around there.”
On Sept. 1, the Tour Championship concludes and someone will take home the season-long trophy as FedEx Cup champion.