The PGA Tour's FedEx Cup season comes to a conclusion each year at the Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta, with the winner of the final tournament in the playoffs earning the now $25 million first-place prize.
Going back to 2019, however, golf fans have been divided about the Tour Championship format, in which the top 30 players in the FedEx Cup standings trade in the points they'd earned through the season for starting strokes that range from 10 under par to even par. From there, the player with the lowest combination of their starting strokes and their 72-hole total against par wins the FedEx Cup.
The gut instinct for a lot of fans is to think that Tiger Woods is the reason for the creation of starting strokes, getting away from the Tour Championship's old reset-points setup that could lead to one player winning the Tour Championship and another player winning the FedEx Cup. That happened in 2018 when Woods won the Tour Championship in one of the best scenes in golf in the last decade. Justin Rose wound up winning the FedEx Cup, though few really noticed his season-long triumph.
However, the genesis for the starting strokes format actually goes back a year to 2017, per Sports Illustrated's Bob Harig.
In 2017, Justin Thomas won the FedEx Cup for the first time, and he should have been thrilled to pick up the season-long race. Thomas, though, wasn't pleased.
At the 72nd hole at East Lake, Thomas needed a birdie on the par-5 18th to tie Xander Schauffele for the lead in the 72-hole event. Instead, Thomas made a frustrating par to lose the event to Schauffele, who was lauded by the crowd for winning the tournament -- despite Thomas doing what he needed to win the FedEx Cup.
Thomas cared more in that moment about the 72-hole tournament than what is billed as the PGA Tour's biggest prize in the FedEx Cup. The Tour realized they had multiple conflicting moments happening at the same time as it relates to the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup. They wanted to divise a system that would eliminate such a conflict and make sure that the in-person and TV audiences both knew exactly who had won the FedEx Cup as a result of the Tour Championship.
The starting strokes concept began in 2019.
