TOUR CHAMPIONSHIP: The top 30 players in the final FedEx Cup standings will tee it up this week at the renowned East Lake Golf Club in suburban Atlanta, the place where the legendary Bobby Jones learned the game, with a cool $40 million on the line, including a whopping $10 million for the winner. Imagine if you could travel back in time and tell Jones, a career amateur who was a practicing attorney at the height of his golf career, that someone was about to make more for winning a 4-day tournament at East Lake than the world’s top surgeons, lawyers, and scientists could ever hope to make in a year. The mind boggles.
Anyway, at least it’s a real tournament this year — after a 6-year experiment with ridiculous handicapped fields, where players began the week with different scores, which ended up removing both the drama and the spirit of competitive fairness from the 4-day event, the PGA Tour, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to give the event back some of its dignity by returning it to a regular old stroke play competition. If Jacob Bridgeman wins this week, becoming FedEx Cup champ and taking home the $10 million, is that “fair”? Sure it is, or at least it’s more fair than giving Scheffler a 10-shot lead on Bridgeman to start the week and calling that a true competition. The people have spoken: give us some drama. Make things tough for Scottie. Hell, he’s gonna win anyway…
East Lake is a Donald Ross classic that has been tweaked and revamped several times, most recently in 2023. It’s long, tipping out at nearly 7,500 yards and playing to a par 70, but the greens are spacious and relatively flat, so if players are finding fairways and swinging their mid-irons well there will be ample birdie opportunities. With its doglegs, tree-framed approach shots, and zoysia fairways that make every ball look like it’s sitting up on a little tee, East Lake is a ball-striker’s delight, and the list of champions here reflects that — Scheffler, Hovland, McIlroy, Cantlay, Schauffele, Woods… all elite tee-to-green guys. There’s no faking it around this track.
With that in mind, here’s what I’m thinking this week:
WIN MARKET
Recommendations to BACK (odds in parenthesis)
Scottie Scheffler (2.98)- Okay, I understand very clearly what is happening here, and if you don’t, that’s your problem. What we have here is a generational phenom at the peak of his powers — think Tiger 20 years ago, Nicklaus in the 70s, Byron Nelson in the 40s, etc. I watched nearly every shot Scottie hit at last week’s BMW, and I am convinced — utterly convinced — that he didn’t have his best stuff, and if you gave him truth serum and spoke with him privately he would probably tell you he didn’t play all that well, though he’s too classy to say so in public. And yet, naturally, he won. When he does play well, he wins easily and turns the Sunday telecasts into naptime for reclining dads across the world, the outcome a foregone conclusion. Sure, maybe one of the other 29 guys in the field will beat Scottie over 4 rounds this week. It could happen, I suppose. But it doesn’t seem very likely, and a price like 2.98 feels like an absolute bargain to me, all things considered. A big, fat bet on Scheffler is the best path forward here. Prepare the victory cigar for Sunday afternoon.
Sam Burns (30.0)– Should Scottie falter, or get arrested en route to the course, his good buddy Sam Burns may be well-positioned to make a run this week. Burns tends to play his best golf on Bermuda greens like those he’ll see at East Lake, and he knows the course well having qualified for this tournament in each of the past five years, with a T4 in 2023 and a T13 last year his two best performances. He’s coming off a good week at the BMW, where he finished 4th and was one of only three players in the field to break 70 all four rounds, so he should be full of confidence this week as he looks to close out the season with the biggest win of his career. He’s worth a bet at the current price.
Chris Gotterup (95.0)- The last six weeks have been life-changing for Gotterup, and with a possible Ryder Cup berth in his future there’s no looking back for the young ball-striking specialist from New Jersey. He began to show signs of form in June, finding the top 30 in three straight PGA Tour events, but his game went nuclear after he crossed the pond with a win in Scotland and a 3rd-place showing at the Open. He returned stateside and found the top 10 at the 3M Open, showing that it was no fluky 2-week run, and after a mediocre week in Memphis he responded with a solid showing at the BMW last week, closing with a 68 that was only bested by six guys in the field on Sunday. This will be his debut appearance at the Tour Championship, of course, but a long and rugged course like East Lake would seem to suit Gotterup, whose tee-to-green stats are tremendous. He’s already shown that he can hang with the big boys, and this is another opportunity — don’t be surprised if the young man takes advantage. He’s a great value at better than 90/1.
