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The bubble drama that peaked on Sunday afternoon is over, the top 70 are set and, starting Thursday, the FedEx Cup Playoffs begin in Memphis. There are two important things to know heading into the PGA Tour’s postseason. First, the tournaments feature fields of 70 players for the FedEx St. Jude Championship, 50 for the BMW Championship, and finally 30 players for the Tour Championship, the first two reduced back in 2023 to give qualifying for the Playoffs more meaning. Second, and new this year, there will be no more “starting strokes” at the Tour Championship; instead, all 30 players will begin the tournament on equal footing, at even par, and the winner will be declared the 2025 FedEx Cup champion.
As we move on to Memphis, here are the seven most intriguing storylines to watch over the playoff stretch.
Will the new Tour Championship format actually work?
Since the FedEx Cup’s inception in 2007, the PGA Tour has boomeranged between different ideas for crowning the champion in Atlanta, and this year is no different. Most notably, the six-year era of “starting strokes,” with the top players in the standings teeing off on Thursday with an advantage corresponding to their rank, is over. You might be thinking, Wait, isn’t that going to annoy someone like Scottie Scheffler, who won’t see any benefit over a guy like current No. 30 Daniel Berger? The answer is no, not really. For starters, Scheffler was among the most critical voices about the staggered-stroke start. And, to make up for the change and account for the solid play throughout the season, the tour is doling out some of the FedEx Cup prize money early. Scheffler, No. 1 on the points list, made $18 million between two different payout systems for finishing first after the Wyndham Championship ended (the rest of the top 10 got paid out, too), and he’s going to make even more after this week, along with the rest of the top 30.
That’s nice for them, but fans could care less. What they will care about is whether this thing feels like a real championship. Let’s say a Berger or a Ryan Gerard type, both hovering around position 30, make the Tour Championship and win … is that going to feel like a legitimate title, or just a random result in August?
The answer for now is a big fat “we’ll see” … and I can’t leave this section without hammering my old hobby horse: The PGA Tour will try anything in Atlanta except match play, but match play is the best way to decide a real champion, and there are ways to do it that wouldn’t be anathema to the broadcast networks.
Ryder Cup drama!!
Andrew Redington
I can’t remember a U.S. team being this unsettled in a very long time, and the next three weeks are going to determine just about everything. Can Wyndham Championship winner Cameron Young or red-hot Jersey boy Chris Gotterup continue their strong play and unseat veterans like Sam Burns and Patrick Cantlay? Will Keegan Bradley play well enough to justify making his own team? There’s so much going on here, and we’ll cover it in separate posts, but it’s going to be fun. The top six are set in stone after the BMW, and Bradley makes his six captain’s picks after the Tour Championship.
On the European side, there’s really only drama for the 12th spot, and much of it will play out on the DP World Tour, but Aaron Rai and Thomas Detry have a big chance in these playoffs to impress Luke Donald.
Can Scottie put the exclamation point on his brilliant season?
Jared C. Tilton
The Great Ravioli Incident put a speed bump in the first part of Scheffler’s 2025, but once he hit his peak, he was his usual unstoppable self, and even though his win (four and counting) total won’t match 2024 (seven), the fact that he bagged two new majors will more than make up for that. The World No. 1—and defending FedEx Cup champion—is in ridiculous form, as he has been for years, and he’ll want to finish out in style with another win in East Lake. This time around, though, as mentioned above, he’ll have to do it on even footing, against the 29 best players in the game. It certainly won’t dim his achievements if he can’t—no one has won the FedEx Cup title in back-to-back years—but knowing Scheffler’s intense competitive streak, he’s going to want to cross the finish line in style, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get a Sunday duel with Rory McIlroy to match the wild finish in 2022. Speaking of …
Does Rory have any juice left to close out the year?
Richard Heathcote
The stretch of golf earlier this year when he won at Pebble, Sawgrass and Augusta represented McIlroy’s most impressive streak since the end of the 2014 season, when he captured two majors and a WGC in the span of a month. Many thought the monumental win at the Masters would unburden him to potentially win at an historic clip, but it didn’t take long to realize the opposite was happening. He seemed to lose his energy starting at the PGA Championship, and it led to a short summer lull. His form came back at the Travelers Championship in late June, and he’s had top-10s in his last three PGA Tour starts. However, he hasn’t played since the Open Championship, and he’ll be skipping the first event. Suffice it to say, he’ll be among the most intriguing stories at the BMW Championship, should he return there.
Locking up signature events for 2026
Andy Lyons
This will be fun to watch specifically this week in Memphis—at the conclusion, the 50 players who qualify for the BMW Championship also gain automatic entry to all of next year’s signature events. That may not seem like a big deal until you remember how much the signature events payout out in money and FedEx Cup points, and realize that there are some compelling names at risk of being left out, from Jordan Spieth (48th in the standings) to Wyndham Clark (49th) to Min Woo Lee (50th) to Rickie Fowler (64th). Even for relatively lesser lights like your Bud Cauleys (53rd) and Max Greysermans (57th), it would be a huge relief to qualify, and that will make for some fun spectating in Memphis.
Can Xander Schauffele salvage anything from the tail end of the season?
Kevin C. Cox
After capturing two majors in 2024 and looming as the undisputed second-best player in the world, Schauffele has had an anticlimactic 2025, starting with a rib injury that slowed and eventually sidelined him in the winter and spring. Unlike Scheffler, he couldn’t come back and round into his previous winning form, but he has showed signs of life lately, with top-10 finishes at the Genesis Scottish Open and the Open in Portrush. And while he certainly hasn’t been bad this year—incredibly, through all the “struggle,” he never even missed a cut—he ranks just 42nd on the FedEx Cup points list coming to Memphis. Now would be a good time to return to his uber-elite ways. Will we see it in the playoffs? Will we see it at the Ryder Cup? Xander remains one of the tour’s most exciting stories, and it might be about to get really good.
Is Cameron Young about to go on a Scottie tear?
Jared C. Tilton
Look, you might say this is a “prisoner of the moment” take, but there is something deeply compelling about the fact that 10 days ago, Young decided to start hitting draws again, and suddenly he looked about three times better than anyone else in the field at the Wyndham. The dude won by six shots, and it would have been more if he didn’t take his foot off the gas on the back nine. That kind of crushing victory is super, super rare on tour, and when it happens, it’s usually because somebody is at the top of the sport, like Scheffler at the Open. Now that Young has the victory monkey off his back, his new draw-biased game feels like a major weapon, and I’m eager to see how it shapes up in Memphis and beyond.
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