2025 Tour Championship Preview

The ever-changing FedEx Cup and tinkering Tour Championship have traveled down a different path this year. The latest format change for 2025 is a bold one: the lowest score over 72 stroke play holes wins. The Starting Strokes, as they came to be known and capitalized in Tour parlance and as a Net Tour Championship with a shadow gross leaderboard in other quarters, are gone.

The format has changed but the favorite is no different. Miraculously, Scottie Scheffler’s odds to win this year starting at even par approximate his odds to win last year, when he started at 10 under. He has zipped past the already absurd 2-to-1 favorite mark and is around +150. He was around +110 last year with a head start (he won low net, placed third in low gross).

There’s an increasing and vapid overreliance on gambling lines to contextualize good play and performance. I do so here to highlight how much Scheffler has separated from all his peers. Of course he should be the favorite, and heavily so with 29 other players to beat. Rory McIlroy is after him somewhere in the 8 or 9/1 range. Scheffler may or may not be “inevitable” as is often cited, but it is expected that he wins. Which is rare air and framing for a golfer.

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Scheffler is riding into Atlanta off a showstopper shot that took golf mainstream, generating tweets from Patrick Mahomes, LeBron James, and a mention from the President of the United States during peace talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The chip-in on the 17th at Caves Valley on Sunday prompted NBC’s Kevin Kisner to relay the mind-boggling point that Scheffler finished the week 1 under on the challenging par 3 despite missing the green all four days. The ball-striking often gets the glory, but the short game, which we know is among the best in the world, got the shine last week and delivered his highlight of the year.

Depth Chart Trouble

So Scheffler is the total package … and yet, these are ostensibly the other 29 best-performing players on his Tour he has to beat, and he is 2-to-1 to win. I raised this issue on Monday’s Shotgun Start, but I do think these very limited field Playoffs events can spotlight some of the lost competition to LIV. A friend was sending around that old, hilarious drawing the Tour promoted of the final 30 for East Lake a few years ago and noted that almost one entire side of the painting was gone and now on LIV. That was a few years ago – now it might just be Bryson and Rahm as the obvious missing competitors. This does not change the fact that Scottie is the best player in the world, has been at Tour events and majors, and the overall Tour product is flying high without missing much of a beat. It likely would not change the Scottie outcomes, but it would be nice to have a few more elite challengers in these small, showcase events. He’s +150 and expected to win. Starting Strokes or not, would you dare pick anyone else?

East Lake Intrigue, Kinda

Perhaps it’s season-end fatigue or a wandering eye toward football, but East Lake has never really done much for me. I watch every year, and rarely do the holes implant in my memory, running together as money gets splashed all over the pros. But I am trying to be better and more committed this week and find several points of intrigue worth watching. It’s year two of the Andrew Green renovation, meaning the greens will be softer than the concrete trampolines of last year, meaning some more challenging pins on new areas of greens might be usable. The Bermuda rough, often some of the most impactful and unpredictable surface when missing a fairway, is also in year two of growing in and being sold to us as primed for the best in the world. It’s not the overseeded fiesta that characterizes so much of the first half of Tour stops and makes missing the fairway a mere shoulder shrug.

For more on the golf course, I found this PGA Tour video with Jason Gore and Gary Young legit good and interesting, diving into golf nerd setup and conditioning questions (not all of which may suit your sensibilities). Ironically, the Tour can shy away from content that’s too “golf-y” in favor of some other promotion. But this is good content that will give you greater insight and appreciation into the course and some of the setup choices being made at a few key holes (that I will commit to memory this year!).

Getting Out of Atlanta

While I will try to appreciate the new East Lake more this week, it may not be in the Tour’s future on an annual basis. Adam Schupak reported ongoing discussions about rotating the Tour Championship out of Atlanta. This is a no-brainer. It must be done. Keep East Lake as part of the rotation. But Schupak added some alarming and amusing elements in his report. The article included a “too many chefs in the kitchen” reference to reinforce the slog of a process, a note that moving away from East Lake faces difficulties because Tim Finchem, who has been out of power almost a decade, may have granted it as a site “in perpetuity,” and Jordan Spieth arguing for it based on his individual performances there. That’s a classic Tour-style trifecta of issues that generally drag on this cruise ship of an organization attempting to make a sensible, obvious move. Welcome aboard, Mr. Rolapp!

The First 100 Days

Speaking of the new CEO, Rolapp will address the press on Wednesday afternoon. It’s unclear if Jay Monahan, who typically speaks in that slot, will also be present. He might have the best gig in sports right now, exiting the stage at Cantlay pace across 18 months for reasons unknown, but with paychecks still coming in and a lot less weight on the shoulders. Rolapp has insisted he’s here to listen and learn. There may be a few schools of management thought here. Develop and build relationships, gather information, and then fit in to impose your vision. Or just use the first 100 days to rumble on through while you can, avoid getting pecked to death by a billion Tour-style special interests that will come to bog you down, and shake it up before you start getting roadblocked by processes or your approval rating goes down. Start moving, and rebuild any burned bridges later.