Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Understanding the FedEx Cup Playoffs


Talking to some golfers at work, I noticed that not everyone fully understands how the FedEx Playoffs work. It is quite confusing and with the recent changes, who has time to be up to date with what's going on? I will try to summarize and simplify it the best I can.

First of all, there are 4 Playoff events: The Barclays at the Liberty National Golf Club in New Jersey, The Deutsche Bank Championship at TPC Boston in Massachusetts, The BMW Championship at the Cog Hill Golf and Country Club in Illinois, and The Tour Championship the East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.

125 players with the most FedEx Cup points will be playing at The Barclays. After the points from this event is awarded, the top 100 players will be playing at The Deutsche Bank Championship. And after that, the top 70 will proceed to Illinois for The BMW Championship. These first 3 events will award 2500 FedEx Cup points to each winner, 5 times more than the 500 points normally awarded to winners during the regular season.

All points during the regular season and the points earned during the first 3 Playoffs will be tallied, determining the top 30 players who will advance to The Tour Championship.

Going in to The Tour Championship, all points will be reset to 2500 for the leader, 2250 for the second place, 2000 for third all the way down to 210 points for the 30th place. Doing so will avoid what happened last year when Vijay Singh won the cup early on making The Tour Championship somewhat meaningless.

If this format was implemented last year, it would've been a sweeter ending for Camilo Villegas, who won both The BMW Championship and Tour Championship.

*Photo from PGA Tour

1 comment:

  1. Just show me the money, all this have a format, change the format is to appease the loosers. It reminds me of little league baseball for the little guys, no one even keeps score, how nice. Why be a winner of multiple events if there is almost no advantage. If they want Woods to play more so ratings stay high then a system where you keep all you points, have each event have enough points so the top 5 can pass up the last weeks leader. The entire top five, not just one guy. Then Woods will have to play or he won't qualify for the Tour Championship. Oh a Phil ... stop being a complaining old lady.

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