The Fact That Shane Lowry And Tiger Woods Aren’t In The Field At The Tour Championship Shows Something Needs To Change With FedEx Cup

The new-look FedEx Cup format is good. The fact that two 2019 major champions didn’t qualify for the season finale is not.

There is no denying that this week’s Tour Championship should be filled with drama. Players are starting with different scores based off of their FedEx Cup points plus the 30-man field is battling for $15 million. On the flip-side, there are some players that aren’t in the field that should be.

Most notably, Tiger Woods and Shane Lowry should be in the field.

Before diving into specifics and numbers, major champions for the year should receive automatic qualification into the Tour Championship. This means there should be 34 available spots for the Tour Championship just in case a major winner doesn’t find himself inside the Top 30 heading into the Playoff finale.

There is a reason majors are regarded as the year’s Top 4 events. If you win one of those you should receive a ticket into the season’s finale.

We, of course, have to completely disregard Woods’ history and only focus on this year, but looking at his results it doesn’t make much sense that he didn’t qualify for the Tour Championship.

Tiger’s lone win was at Augusta National, but he wracked up three other Top 10 finishes, two of which coming at WGC events. That was good enough for a 42nd place finish in the FedEx Cup standings.

Lowry’s only win was at Royal Portrush, but he also tallied three other Top 10 finishes including a T-8 at the PGA Championship leaving him at 33rd in the standings.

Now let me introduce some results for an unknown player that did qualify for the Tour Championship. This player had zero wins, had a second-place finish back in March, four other Top 10 finishes and his best finish in a major was T-23 at the PGA Championship. That’s the resume of Jason Kokrak who was the last man into the field of the Tour Championship at No. 30.

It’s not a knock against Kokrak at all, but that set of results up against the lists of Tiger and Lowry isn’t the same, we all know that. The argument here though is Kokrark’s schedule as he played in far more PGA Tour events than Woods and Lowry, but he still doesn’t have that major win, or any win for that matter, to his credit.

Winning a major should outweigh any finish in any non-major event, and they do, but just not enough from a FedEx Cup points standpoint. Winning a major or The Players nets you 600 points, while winning a regular Tour event nets you 500 points.

The No. 29 player in the standings? That’s Lucas Glover who didn’t step in the winner’s circle this year, but did wrack up seven Top 10 finishes including two Top 20 finishes in both The Open and PGA Championships.

The biggest outlier among the field at the Tour Championship is Sungjae Im. The 21-year-old enters the week at No. 24 in the standings, and the biggest reason he finds himself in the season finale are his seven Top 10 finishes, but even more so due to the fact he made 34 starts this season.

Im missed the cut at The Players, PGA Championship and The Open but comfortably got into the Tour Championship.

That doesn’t make too much sense, but then again he did what was available and that was to make as many starts as possible, make cuts and slide into the Tour Championship rather comfortably. You could say he exploited the system and more power to him for doing so.

With all of this being said, there would be nothing to lose (other than maybe some money) in offering up automatic spots for the year’s major winners if they don’t automatically qualify for the season’s finale.

Nobody walking the planet would argue that the addition of Lowry and Woods to the event this week would hurt anything. Ratings go up, ticket prices go up and interest goes up, no question. This would be the same for any major winners any given year, not just Woods and Lowry; major winners each year hold a different status over other winners that year.

Rewarding the consistency of players throughout the year wouldn’t change, and it shouldn’t, but adding major winners just makes too much sense.

The new format is a good start to making the FedEx Cup Playoffs better, but adding the major winners is a simple fix that needs to happen.