– This Thursday marks the start of the play-offs that will determine the winner of the FedEx Cup 2025 with the FedEx St. Jude Championship. These play-offs are reaching their maturity, as 18 years ago (23rd to 26th August 2007) the first one was held, which was The Barclays, at the Westchester Country Club. Steve Stricker won it, by the way, and Tiger Woods decided not to play.
– Surely very few remember this fact: in that first play-off, the top 144 in the ranking were eligible, although only 138 played. In 2008, again, the top 144 were eligible, and by 2009 the format changed, allowing only the top 125 into the first play-off, which remained the case until 2022. It was in the recent 2023 when only the top 70 earned the right to play.
– It’s interesting to revisit the list of players who competed in that first play-off, 18 years ago, and note that only two are repeating in the first play-off of 2025, which begins this Thursday at TPC Southwind in Memphis. They are Lucas Glover and Justin Rose. No one else. Those first play-offs ended on 16th September 2007, and just two days later, on 18th September, a certain Rory McIlroy turned professional…
– As is well known, Rory, who is not present this week in Memphis, is the King of the play-offs: he has won the FedEx Cup three times and has six victories in these play-offs, the same as Dustin Johnson and two more than Tiger Woods, who won four. They (Rory, D. J., and Tiger) are the ones who have won the most tournaments in the play-offs. Only Rory and Tiger have won the FedEx Cup more than once. Woods won it twice.
– No one, by the way, has won the FedEx Cup twice in a row. Rory did it in 2016, 2019, and 2022; and Tiger in 2007 and 2009. And that, winning the FedEx Cup twice in a row, is precisely what Scottie Scheffler could achieve this year, which would also make him the first player to win the FedEx Cup twice before turning thirty (Rory won it for the second time at 30, a few months earlier).
– Let’s also remember that it was in 2019 when only three play-offs were played for the first time, instead of the four that were held until then. And it was also that same year 2019 when the player who arrived first in the ranking at the last play-off, the Tour Championship, started with a -10 advantage, the second with -8, and so on. A system that never fully satisfied anyone and that precisely in this 2025 becomes history.
– In that first play-off 18 years ago, a Spaniard, Sergio García, played. But there was another, José María Olazábal, who had also earned the right to play after reaching the event ranked 105th, but he didn’t play, suffering from a flare-up of that rheumatic condition that caused him so many problems in his career.
– Only four Spanish players, therefore, have played any play-off tournament in these 18 years of history: Sergio García, Gonzalo Fernández Castaño, Rafa Cabrera Bello, and Jon Rahm. But it’s worth remembering that there was a fifth, Olazábal, who also earned that right in 2007, although he couldn’t play. Additionally, only two other Spaniards have had the opportunity to qualify by holding a PGA Tour card at some point in their careers, but they didn’t succeed: Alejandro Cañizares, who obtained playing rights on the US circuit in 2007 through the School, but finished 205th in the ranking in 2008; and Jorge Campillo, who also played on the PGA Tour in 2024, but ended the regular season ranked 136th and missed the play-offs. (Miguel Ángel Jiménez was also a PGA Tour member, but before the FedEx Cup and play-offs began).
– Perhaps it doesn’t need reminding, but just in case: in the 66 play-off tournaments held to date since that first one in August 2007, there is only one Spanish victory, that of Jon Rahm in the 2020 BMW Championship, winning a crazy playoff (that impossible, long-distance putt…) against Dustin Johnson on the North course of the Olympia Fields Country Club.
