Two weeks ago, Scottie Scheffler, the world’s leading player and current leader in the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs, called the premise of the entire competition “silly.”

“You can’t call it the season race and have it come down to a tournament,” Scheffler said in Memphis, Tenn. “Say we get to East Lake, my neck is burning and it’s not healing like it did at The Players, and I finish 30th in the FedEx Cup because I had to withdraw from the last tournament? Is that really the season race? No. It is what it is.”

Scheffler believes the FedEx Cup playoffs are more about “determining the player who plays the best in those playoff events,” rather than the best player of the entire season. Take Keegan Bradley, the 50th and final player to make the BMW Championship, who won in Denver on Sunday to move up to fourth in the standings. He will begin this week’s tournament at 6 under par, just four strokes behind Scheffler. Bradley has a good chance of winning the $25 million bonus at the end of this week in Atlanta.

“I would use Keegan Bradley as a great example of what the playoffs are,” Scheffler said Tuesday. “You can have someone who wasn’t having his best year and then all of a sudden he makes it what could be his best year or one of his best years on tour.”

At its core, what Scheffler is describing is not a season-long competition. All reasonable arguments, right? Why do we call this a season-long race when it simply isn’t?

It’s more complicated than that. Scheffler’s criticism of the Tour Championship is precisely why the format changed to the “starting strokes” model in 2019. From the Tour’s perspective, by allocating strokes to each player based on their place in the rankings at the start of the Tour Championship, the FedEx Cup strikes a balance between the responsibilities of a season-long race and a race that ends with a winner.

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The PGA Tour wanted the FedEx Cup to culminate in a single tournament and a single champion: the player who wins the Tour Championship also wins the FedEx Cup. It’s eye-catching. It’s (somewhat) easy to follow. The broadcast doesn’t need to constantly switch to a dizzying graphic of the scoring system changing in real time. We can just watch a golf tournament that’s just a golf tournament – but with $25 million at stake.

In the previous format, the Tour Championship effectively featured two champions: the player who performed best at East Lake and the one who finished at the top of the points list. This was most famously the case in 2018, when fans surrounded Tiger Woods on the 18th fairway after he won the first but Justin Rose won the second.

Now the points freeze before the Tour Championship and are converted into strokes: Scheffler begins the week at 10 under par, Xander Schauffele at 8 under par, Hideki Matsuyama at 7 under par, Bradley at 6 under par and Ludvig Åberg at 5 under par. Then numbers 6-10 start at 4 under par. Numbers 11-15 are at 3 under par; numbers 16-20 at 2 under par; numbers 21-25 at 1 under par and numbers 26-30 at even par.

FedEx sponsorship permeates the PGA Tour’s playoff system. (Andy Lyons / Getty Images)

It’s still confusing. And Scheffler still isn’t quite there. What does the FedEx Cup mean if it isn’t exactly what the PGA Tour calls it: a season-long race?

“I think we need a race that lasts all season. I think the FedExCup has been really good for our tour and for the game. I think it’s an exciting way to end the year,” Scheffler said. “Personally, I didn’t have a lot of issues with the old format. When I looked at it, I thought it was interesting who would finish where, and it didn’t necessarily bother me that the winner of the Tour Championship wasn’t the winner of the FedExCup. It makes for a little less volatility, which is the downside.”

“As far as the full season race goes, I think yes, I would have deserved to win the full season race if I had won that many times and won a playoff event, but then at the end of the day we come here and it would be like what we worked for all year to get a great result on TV is now over.”

And that is precisely where the problem lies: in the meaning of the “product”.

Scheffler went on a long, honest rant about the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup format on Tuesday. Some of his answers were so long that Schauffele, who was next on the media schedule, had to wait his turn in the corner of the media tent for nearly 10 minutes while he listened to Scheffler’s take. You can tell that Scheffler has thought about this topic in detail. The world number one didn’t just identify the problem with the FedEx Cup playoffs. He pinpointed exactly what is holding the PGA Tour back as an organization in general.

Scheffler’s realization of why the Tour Championship doesn’t make sense — and his acceptance of that reason — is telling given the state of professional sports. Faced with the threat of LIV, the PGA Tour is plagued by conflicting priorities that drive it in different directions. What do the players want? What do the fans want? What do the TV networks want? It doesn’t matter. None of this can happen without the sponsors — they keep the Tour running and they always win.

“Basically, it comes down to people putting up the money for us to play with,” Scheffler said. “At the end of the day, we have sponsors for our tournaments and they want it a certain way, and if FedEx is putting up as much money on this event as they are now, we have to play the way they want us to. It’s as simple as that.”

Although he had expressed his opinion in recent weeks, Scheffler ended his press conference by saying that he had no interest in expressing his opinion on the issue in the future, at least not publicly.

“All I can do is show up and step up and contribute when it’s needed,” Scheffler said. “Sometimes it can get overdone when I’m sitting up here and contributing.”

Scheffler knows where he can be valuable and he knows where he can’t. That’s just the state of the PGA Tour right now. And that’s saying something.

(Top photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)