Rory McIlroy makes his 2025 FedEx Cup Playoffs debut this week at the BMW Championship — a week later than everyone else in the field. The world No. 2 returns for his first competitive outing since The Open (hosted in his home country of Northern Ireland), playing in the United States for the first time in two months.
While McIlroy did not lose any ground in the FedEx Cup standings by sitting out the postseason opener last week at the St. Jude Championship, his absence at TPC Southwind has brought up questions about whether the current playoff format works for the PGA Tour.
Combined with the Tour’s decision in May to shed the Tour Championship of its tiered long-held starting strokes format — first implemented in 2019 — the FedEx Cup Playoffs has perhaps lost some of its identity. Is it a playoff or the conclusion of a season-long race? Not even McIlroy has the answer at this juncture.
“I don’t know. It’s hard,” McIlroy said. “It’s like every other … American sport has playoffs, and they sort of try to make a big deal of the end of the season. I think it’s hard in golf. Look, I come from a place where … Liverpool won the Premier League last year with five games to spare. That sometimes what happens in sports. Sometimes you have guys or you have a team that is just that much better than everyone else that season, and they are the deserving winner.
“From a player perspective, it seems like the consensus was that people didn’t like the starting strokes. So to get rid of that is a good thing. But I now think that, the Tour Championship not being starting strokes, it’s sort of … it’s its own thing now.
“Obviously, you win the Tour Championship, which then means you win the FedExCup, but I don’t necessarily think that means that you’re the season-long winner — unless Scottie Scheffler wins it and he is the season-long winner. … He’s won two majors this year. He’s head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the points going into this week. He’ll be ahead of everyone in the points going into next week. So, he’s deservedly got his bonus all the way through. Then everything resets, and it’s sort of — yeah, I guess I see it as more of a one-off event than a culmination of the entire season.”
McIlroy has made mincemeat of the PGA Tour’s postseason throughout his career. He is the only three-time FedEx Cup champion in the 19-year history of the playoffs, having participated in each Tour Championship format — cumulative season-long points, starting strokes based on place in FedEx Cup standings and this year’s edition, which will mirror a run-of-the-mill tournament as all 30 golfers start from an even playing field.
The 2025 Tour Championship format is expected to be a placeholder, serving as a bridge to the 2026 season. What format the 2026 playing of the event will take is unknown, but McIlroy admitted that he has been keeping tabs on possible solutions that have been floated.
“There’s obviously been a lot of discourse about should these playoffs be mandatory or not,” McIlroy continued. “Obviously, I didn’t play last week, and is that something that they need to look at? It could be something — and I’ve heard this idea kicked around — where everything resets after Wyndham [Championship] and then the top 70 just play for the top 50 spots to get into the next week and then everything resets again here, and then the top 30 from this week then make it to the Tour Championship.
“I mean, if you want to try to make it straight playoffs and elimination, that would be a good way to go. You’re trying to balance a lot of different things. You’re trying to balance the competitive integrity of what the playoffs are, but you’re also trying to keep the media rights partners happy, you’re trying to keep the sponsors happy. They’re the people that are paying the big bucks to expect the big names to be playing in their golf tournaments, and that’s a delicate balance.”