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Rory McIlroy would have won the Tour Championship and FedEx Cup under the old system, too
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Rory McIlroy is the first FedEx Cup champion under the new stroke-adjusted format that debuted at the 2019 Tour Championship. And for the curious, he would have been the 13th FedEx Cup champion under the old system as well.
Indeed, had the PGA Tour left everything alone after last year’s Tour Championship, keeping the points system it had been using, what came to pass at East Lake on Sunday would essentially have been the same.
McIlroy’s rounds of 66-67-68-66 left him at 13-under-par 267, which was the lowest aggregate score of any of the 30 players in the field at East Lake. In other words, he would have won the old Tour Championship title. Next closest was Xander Schauffele, who shot a 10-under 270. In third place was Paul Casey at seven under, followed by Brooks Koepka (six under) and Adam Scott and Chez Reavie at five under.
McIlroy started the Tour Championship in fifth place on the FedEx Cup list. Under the points-reset system that had been used for the past several years in Atlanta, any player in the top five who went on to win the Tour Championship also would be the winner of the FedEx Cup. And so, Rory would have pulled off the double of winning both titles, an outcome that had happened eight of the previous 12 years since the FedEx Cup’s inception, including when McIlroy won the FedEx Cup previously in 2016.
Here is how the top five in the FedEx Cup final points list would have shaken out if you applied the old system this year compared to how the final results wound up on Sunday at East Lake.
