Following an exciting regular season, the PGA Tour hosts a three-tournament postseason, the 2024 FedEx Cup Playoffs, which concludes with a massive Tour Championship where the majority of the grand total $100 million purse is dished out to golfers. In fact, the $25 million top prize is tied for the largest payout on the PGA Tour this season with the Players Championship.
Only 70 golfers advanced to the first round of the playoffs, the FedEx St. Jude Championship, same as last season. With 20 of those players now eliminated following the first event of the playoffs at TPC Southwind in Memphis, some of the biggest names in golf will no longer have a chance to compete for the top prize.
There’s plenty of star power in the field, though, with Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele atop the standings and other significant players like Rory McIlroy, Hideki Matsuyama, Collin Morikawa and Wyndham Clark in contention. For Scheffler, a FedEx Cup win would be his first, but it would also serve as a feather in his cap on the back of a stellar season that already includes six PGA Tour victories and an Olympic gold medal. The same goes for Schauffele, a two-time major championship winner this season.
For everyone involved, there will be a ton of money and plenty of accolades at stake over the next three weeks. Let’s take a closer look at what to expect from this year’s festivities.
2024 FedEx Cup Playoffs schedule
|
FedEx St. Jude Championship |
Aug. 15-18 |
Memphis, Tenn. |
TPC Southwind |
70 |
|
BMW Championship |
Aug. 22-25 |
Castle Pines, Colo. |
Castle Pines |
50 |
|
Tour Championship |
Aug. 29 – Sept. 1 |
Atlanta, Ga. |
East Lake Golf Club |
30 |
The top 70 in the FedEx Cup standings, via points accumulated throughout the year, played in the St. Jude Championship this week.
All three events are 72-hole, stroke-play tournaments, though the fields gradually get smaller as the playoffs roll on. The points change, too, as everything is quadrupled. During regular-season events, most winners receive 500 FedEx Cup points for finishing first at tournaments (in a handful of events, 600 points went to first place). The winners of the first two FedEx Cup Playoffs events will instead receive 2,000 points each. The point boost goes for every slot on the leaderboard: 300 for second becomes 1,200 and so on.
Only seven golfers surpassed the 2,000-point total during the entire regular season: Scheffler, Schauffele, McIlroy, Collin Morikawa, Wyndham Clark, Ludvig Åberg and Sahith Theegala. Scheffler opened with nearly a 3,500-point lead on third-place McIlroy, while Schauffele himself was 1,500 points up on the rest of the field.
Still, the FedEx Cup standings can shift quite a bit — especially for the winners of the first two events — over the next couple weeks. Winners are disproportionately rewarded and deservedly so given this is the postseason. This provides the opportunity for golfers to go on a hot streak and rocket up the FedEx Cup standings. Regardless of what else happens, the first two playoff winners will be in great spots entering the finale, the Tour Championship at East Lake. Similar to other sports, now that the postseason has begun, almost anything can happen.
The top 50 in the FedEx Cup standings after the St. Jude Championship move on to the BMW Championship. Then the top 30 after that move on to the Tour Championship.
2024 FedEx Cup standings
Scheffler and Schauffele are having extraordinary seasons. They rank No. 1 and No. 3 on the all-time single season money list at $29.1 million and $17.6 million, respectively, following the first playoff event. Those numbers will only go up from there as the second playoff event, the BMW Championship, has a similar $20 million purse to the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
Here’s a look at the top 30 in the standings following the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
|
1 |
Scottie Scheffler (6,533) |
16 |
Viktor Hovland (1,834) |
|
2 |
Xander Schauffele (5,037) |
17 |
Russell Henley (1,777) |
|
3 |
Hideki Matsuyama (3,899) |
18 |
Sam Burns (1,685) |
|
4 |
Collin Morikawa (2,596) |
19 |
Billy Horschel (1,392) |
|
5 |
Rory McIlroy (2,559) |
20 |
Matthieu Pavon (1,608) |
|
6 |
Wyndham Clark (2,504) |
21 |
Aaron Rai (1,589) |
|
7 |
Ludvig Åberg (2,146) |
22 |
Justin Thomas (1,445) |
|
8 |
Sahith Theegala (2,076) |
23 |
Christiaan Bezuidenhout (1,546) |
|
9 |
Patrick Cantlay (2,017) |
24 |
Sepp Straka (1,516) |
| 10 | Sungjae Im (1,950) | 25 | Jason Day (1,485) |
|
11 |
Shane Lowry (1,895) |
26 |
Davis Thompson (1,465) |
| 12 | Robert MacIntyre (1,885) | 27 | Taylor Pendrith (1,464) |
| 13 | Akshay Bhatia (1,847) | 28 | Tom Hoge (1,450) |
| 14 | Tony Finau (1,843) | 29 | Brian Harman (1,446) |
| 15 | Ben An (1,835) | 30 | Denny McCarthy (1,365) |
Even though anything can happen over the next two weeks, players are still rewarded for what they accomplished in the regular season. The lead Scheffler (nearly 3,000 points over third) and Schauffele (1,100 points over third) have built will be difficult to chip away if those two continue performing well. For example, Schauffele is the only player who can mathematically catch Scheffler next week at the BMW Championship, and it will take a win to do it. Matsuyama is the only player who can catch Schauffele for second.
Scheffler and Schauffele are in a great spot to jump into the top two spots at the Tour Championship where they would start at 10 under and 8 under, respectively. That gives them a huge head start on winning the first FedEx Cup of their careers. For either, it would be emblematic of the quality of golf they have played for the last seven months as the 2024 PGA Tour season winds down.
2024 Tour Championship format
Heading into the Tour Championship inside the top five or top 10 in the FedEx Cup standings is important because of how scoring is dispersed. Whoever is first in the FedEx Cup standings after the BMW Championship starts the Tour Championship at 10 under, and the event is played under normal scoring conditions from there. Second starts at 8 under and so on (see full numbers below).
With so much money at stake (again, $25 million for first place), those margins become more meaningful than even a normal week. The eventual winners of the four FedEx Cups played under this format have all started in the top seven at the Tour Championship.
- 1st: -10
- 2nd: -8
- 3rd: -7
- 4th: -6
- 5th: -5
- 6th to 10th: -4
- 11th to 15th: -3
- 16th to 20th: -2
- 21st to 25th: -1
- 26th to 30th: E
2024 FedEx Cup Playoffs purse, prize money
2024 St. Jude Championship purse, prize money
- 1st: $3.6 million
- 2nd: $2.2 million
- 3rd: $1.4 million
- 4th: $960,000
- 5th: $800,000
- 6th: $720,000
- 7th: $670,000
- 8th: $620,000
- 9th: $580,000
- 10th: $540,000
2024 BMW Championship purse, prize money
- 1st: $3.6 million
- 2nd: $2.2 million
- 3rd: $1.4 million
- 4th: $990,000
- 5th: $830,000
- 6th: $750,000
- 7th: $695,000
- 8th: $640,000
- 9th: $600,000
- 10th: $560,000
2024 Tour Championship purse, prize money
The figures are startling for the finale. The winner of the Tour Championship receive $18 million. If you just make into the final FedEx Cup Playoff event, you’re guaranteed $500,000. Here’s a look at what the lucrative top 10 will look like at the Tour Championship.
- 1st: $25 million
- 2nd: $12.5 million
- 3rd: $7.5 million
- 4th: $6 million
- 5th: $5 million
- 6th: $3.5 million
- 7th: $2.75 million
- 8th: $2.25 million
- 9th: $2 million
- 10th $1.75 million
Last year, Viktor Hovland won the BMW Championship and then took the Tour Championship and FedEx Cup over Schauffele. Both players shot the same 19-under score at East Lake to end the year, but Hovland started the tournament at 8 under while Schauffele only started it at 3 under so Hovland easily won by five and took home the first prize of what was then $18 million.
