PGA Tour scrap staggered format of the Tour Championship, so how will the new system work?

Complaints in the golf world increase tenfold every August nowadays. Firstly, because there is no longer a major championship played that month, but also because the Tour Championship format is often heavily criticised.

Well, this might change now.

The Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta, which is the season-ending event on the PGA Tour which the top 30 players in the FedEx Cup standings compete in, used to use Starting Strokes – a type of handicap system based on performances across the season.

For example, Scottie Scheffler started the 72-hole tournament on 10-under in 2024, because he won virtually every event he played in, and Chris Kirk, Tom Hoge, Aaron Rai, Christiaan Bezuidenhout, and Justin Thomas started on level-par.

Starting Scores have now been abolished, as per a PGA Tour announcement on May 27, 2025. It will be a straight 72-hole shootout off level scores and like any golf tournament, the lowest score wins, and the player with the lowest score takes the FedEx Cup home.

Why have the Tour Championship starting scores changed?

The obvious issue with the old Tour Championship format was that the players starting on level-par, 10 shots behind the World No.1 Scottie Scheffler in last year’s case, had no chance of catching up.

Bezuidenhout and Hoge finished joint last in 2024, 27 shots behind Scheffler having started 10 shots behind. As much as they were more than compensated for showing good form in the season and qualifying for the season-ending event by banking $555,000 in prize money after the final round, their hands were tied from a competitive perspective.

People on the other side of the debate might argue that without Starting Strokes, the top-performing players throughout the season aren’t rewarded with an advantage at the Tour Championship to win the FedEx Cup. Scheffler with eight wins would start on the same score as Bezuidenhout with no wins, as a hypothetical example.

But like other sports, golf is faced with the balancing act of the playoffs. It is extremely difficult to weigh up what is fair and what is entertainment. If we use the example of football in the UK, a team that finishes third in the EFL Championship table enters the playoffs against the teams that finish fourth, fifth and sixth.

That third-placed team might have narrowly missed out on the top two spots, which means promotion to the Premier League, but now they’re launched into the chaos of the playoffs, where they must face teams they’ve outperformed across the 46-game season. Fair? Probably not. Entertaining? Definitely.

The Tour Championship is the last of three legs of the FedEx Cup Playoffs. The top 70 players in the FedEx Cup rankings play in the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the top 50 from that tournament qualify for the BMW Championship, then the top 30 from that play in the Tour Championship.

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While there is a conundrum with how the Tour Championship format should look, a similar issue exists with the entire playoff system itself. In 2024, Keegan Bradley scraped into the BMW Championship as player no.50, but then he won the BMW Championship and climbed 46 spots to 4th in the FedEx Cup standings and had a genuine chance of winning the Tour Championship.

“It depends how you want to describe it. If you want to just have a player that’s playing the best at the end of the year, I think the Playoffs will definitely identify that player,” Scheffler said at the 2024 Tour Championship, before he won it.

“In terms of the season-long race, it’s maybe not always going to be the guy that plays the best the whole season; it’s going to be the guy that plays the best in these playoff events. That’s really what you’re identifying is the guy that plays the best in these last three events.

“It’s a format that’s changed a bunch or a few times over the past few years. In terms of when it first got started, you had a year where I think it was Padraig Harrington won two majors and maybe didn’t make the BMW, and I know he didn’t make this tournament. So arguably it wasn’t really a great setup then.

“And then you change the points to be a little lit less valuable in the Playoffs, but you still see a lot of volatility. You look at a guy like Keegan Bradley who shows last week and has a great week and wins the tournament, and now all of a sudden he goes from not being in East Lake to having a really, really great chance to win the FedExCup.”

It is worth noting that the Comcast Business Tour Top 10 initiative financially rewards the top 10 in the FedEx Cup rankings at the end of the regular season before the playoffs start. So if the best players from the regular season underperform at the playoffs, they have at last been handsomely compensated for their overall play across several months.

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How does the Tour Championship work? Well, now you know! Tell us what you think on X!