Rory McIlroy is an advocate for the heavily-criticised FedEx Cup Playoffs format, but it delivered an unsatisfying conclusion at the Tour Championship and Eddie Pepperell has given a scathing verdict
Two-time DP World Tour winner Eddie Pepperell has slammed the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup Playoffs format after the Tour Championship failed to deliver a compelling conclusion on Sunday.
Scottie Scheffler cruised to victory at East Lake in Atlanta, winning the £19million title by four shots from Collin Morikawa. Scheffler had been the dominant force throughout the PGA Tour season, clinching his seventh win of the year – plus Olympics gold – en route to topping the tour’s season-long order of merit.
The format of the playoffs has been widely criticised in recent years. In a bid to make the final event of the season more captivating for TV audiences, Scheffler started with a mere two-shot advantage at East Lake – hardly a fair reflection of his superiority over his peers in 2024.
Prior to a format change in 2019, Scheffler would have had the FedEx Cup title wrapped up weeks before the end of the season. Instead, he had to wait until the Tour Championship to clinch his victory. And he did so in such a fashion that made a mockery of the tour’s efforts to engineer an entertaining conclusion, leading by seven after the opening round and never coming under a genuine threat from the chasing pack.
Many critics of the format would prefer to see the Tour Championship played as a standalone event with every player starting at level par, rather than the current setup. Scheffler started at 10-under and the rest of the 30-man field teed off between eight-under and level par, depending on their place in the FedEx Cup standings.
In previous years, the consensus player of the year has failed to win the FedEx Cup, including in 2022 when Scheffler was beaten to the title by Rory McIlroy despite starting the Tour Championship atop the standings after winning four tournaments including The Masters.
Had the Tour Championship been a standard strokeplay event and the FedEx Cup format pre-2019 been in place, Scheffler would have still lifted the season-long title but Morikawa would have won the event at 22-under-par, one shot clear of Sahith Theegala and two ahead of the world No. 1.
World No. 3 and three-time FedEx Cup champion McIlroy has declared his support for the new format, insisting it is more entertaining for viewers if the winner of the FedEx Cup is not decided until the final event.
But 33-year-old Pepperell, a panellist on The Chipping Forecast podcast, believes it would have been much more satisfying viewing had the Tour Championship been allowed to “stand its own two feet”, describing the current iteration of the FedEx Cup as “meaningless”.
It’s not even that it’s nonsense, it’s just entirely meaningless and one wonders why we are playing this game,” he said. “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, and it’s crazy. And the game will end up losing, I think there’ll end up being a pretty catastrophic, at some point, coming down to reality.
Watching it on Sunday, I just felt sorry for the tournament because if the tournament had existed on its own two feet as such, it would’ve 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.
“And this is why I fundamentally disagree with people like Rory who quite often [emphasise] 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 if you do, you end up where we are which is entirely lost with a very gimmicky format. And I think it would be very 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 it three weeks out then that is the thing you celebrate because that is what success looks like.”
