Justin Rose outlasted some great competition to be the first player aged 40 years or older to win on tour this year – the first of the FedEx playoff tournaments.
For those who don’t know, the FedEx Cup Playoffs is 3 tournaments to determine the FedEx Cup Champion (essentially the year’s best golfer). All season long golfers accumulate points based on how they do. The top 70 players are eligible to part of the first playoff – this past weekend’s St. Jude Championship, then the field gets cut down to 50 for next week’s BMW championship, and finally the top 30 golfers that come out of that will compete for the TOUR Championship…a prize worth $10 million! Not a bad pay day as a result of playing some golf.
The top 50 players also are full exempt for the following season including the Players Championship as well as all 8 signature events – so no need to stress if you start the year off poorly, you’re already in.
I won’t go into details on the point system in how they award the players for their finishes (a quick google search will be able to explain it better to you anyways). But note that the final tournament (the TOUR Championship) is an electrifying 72 holes with a few changes this year. The playoffs started in 2007, and since then the tour has been tweaking what they can to improve it. In 2019 they initiated “starting strokes” that had the leader start the weekend at -10, the next player at -8, and so forth – rewarding the best player up to that point. But this year they have removed this feature, and all players will start at even par.
Most players didn’t like it and now it is gone. So essentially, you make the final tournament as one of the best 30 players and then all bets are off. May the best golfer win. I’m sure more changes will be made over the years, but it’s a great way to finish the golf season, giving a playoff and championship feeling to a sport that doesn’t operate the same way as major sports do.
Tommy Fleetwood let yet another victory slip away, still waiting to claim his first win on tour, and Justin Rose beat out this year’s U.S. Open winner J.J. Spaun in a playoff to claim the first victory of this years playoff. Congrats to all the golfers who made the cut for the second playoff event next week…we should be in for quite the finish to the 2025 season!
2 OFF THE TEE 