When the winner of Sunday’s Tour Championship lifts the trophy, he’ll have something in common with 2007 Tiger Woods: he’ll be walking away from East Lake Golf Club with a $10 million first-place FedEx Cup prize.
But a whole lot else has changed. The venues are different. The fields have shrunk. And it looks a whole lot different than it did at the beginning. Let’s buzz through a quick history of the FedEx Cup Playoffs. No prize money included.
Prize fund: $35 mil
First-place check: $10 mil
Format notes: The PGA Tour first released its plans for a playoff in Nov. 2005, to be rolled out for the 2007 season. That first playoff year was a four-tournament setup; 144 players qualified for the first event, the Barclays, before cutting to 120 for the Deutsche Bank Championship, 70 for the BMW Championship and 30 for the Tour Championship.
Fun fact: Looking back, hosting these first three events outside New York (Westchester Country Club), Boston (TPC Boston) and Chicago (Cog Hill) before heading to Atlanta for the Tour Championship seems like a simple winning formula. Also it probably didn’t hurt that Phil Mickelson won the Deutsche Bank and Tiger Woods won the BMW and Tour Championship.
Prize fund: $35 mil
First-place check: $10 mil
Format notes: In early 2008 changes were announced to the playoff points system, essentially juicing the points and punishing players who might be thinking of skipping the first event. (Woods had skipped the first-ever playoff event, the Barclays, the year prior.)
After the 2008 playoffs, further points changes were announced for the 2009 season to guarantee that what had happened in 2008 — Vijay Singh building such a big lead that the FedEx Cup was decided before they’d even teed it up at the Tour Championship — wouldn’t happen again. The field for the first event was reduced to 125 players, followed by 100, 70 and 30.
Fun fact: It’s comical looking back at the first two winners, Woods and Singh, who finished with 123,033 and 125,101 FedEx Cup points, respectively; nobody cracked the 5,000-point marker in the decade that followed.
Prize fund: $60 mil
First-place check: $15 mil
Format notes: Here’s where everything changed. (Again.) The Tour reduced its number of events from four to three and moved the playoff’s dates up, finishing the final week of August and avoiding football in the process. That meant the Dell Technologies Championship (held in Boston) got axed. While 125 players still made the playoffs, they cut from 125 to 70 and then to 30.
This was also the beginning of the “Starting Strokes” era, in which the top-ranked player entering the Tour Championship earned an advantage to start the week, starting at 10 under par while second place would start at 8 under, third at 7 under, fourth at 6 under and on down to even par.
Fun fact: Remember when Tiger Woods won the Tour Championship in 2018 — and then that same night got on a flight to France for the 2019 Ryder Cup? That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, because the playoffs wrap up a month earlier.
Prize fund: $75 mil
First-place check: $18 mil
Format notes: No significant format changes, but 2022 was notable because it was LIV Golf’s first season, players were defecting left and right and the PGA Tour responded with other format changes to its schedule (enter Signature Events) as well as various ways to get its players more money. That meant a bump to $75 million for the FedEx Cup, it meant increased purses and it meant ramping up the Player Impact Program (PIP) which would ultimately swell to $100 million on its own. (Also, for 2023, the field for the first playoff event was reduced to 70.)
Fun fact: Several of LIV’s players sued the PGA Tour for keeping them out of the FedEx Cup playoffs. Three players — Talor Gooch, Hudson Swafford and Matt Jones — tried to get a temporary restraining order to play the FedEx St. Jude Championship. It was ultimately denied.
Prize fund: $100 mil
First-place check: $25 mil
Format notes: If you increase prize money everywhere else (as with the Signature Events) you’d better juice up the playoff money to keep pace. Thanks in part to the sunsetting of the Player Impact Program, the Tour jacked up its prize money even further, sending $25 million to winner Scottie Scheffler.
Fun fact: $25 million is just a lot of money for winning a golf tournament.
Prize fund: $100 mil
First-place check: $10 mil (ish)
Format notes: The Tour ditched “Starting Strokes” and introduced a new FedEx finale format that was an awful lot like the pre-playoff edition of the Tour Championship: 30 players, low score wins.
But because the FedEx Cup is designed to reward season-long play, they spread payment across several tournaments instead of just dishing it out at the end of the season. That meant the No. 1-ranked Scheffler took home $10 million at the end of the regular season, plus $8 million for winning the Comcast Business Tour Top 10. Scheffler got another bonus of $5 million for remaining at that No. 1 spot after the BMW Championship. And he’ll have a chance at another $10 million if he can emerge the winner at the end of the Tour Championship.
Fun fact: Nice work, if you can get it.
A partial payout list is in the graphic below; you can see the entire Tour Championship purse here.
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