The PGA Tour season comes to an end this week at the 13th Tour Championship of the FedEx Cup Era.  Justin Rose took home the FedEx Cup title in 2018 despite not winning a FedEx Cup event, but that changes this year.  The winner of this week's tournament is the FedEx Cup champion, plain and simple but with a slight twist.  The players will start in varied spots on the leaderboard depending on where they currently stand on the FedEx Cup points list.  Our FedEx Cup points leader is Justin Thomas and he will begin the Tour Championship at 10 under par before he even tees it up on Thursday afternoon.  The rest of the field falls down behind him on the starting leaderboard to where players between 26-30 on the list will start at even par. 

I think all of this will certainly make things interesting to say the least but it also think it makes the strategy of picking players even more difficult.  DraftKings has said on their site that this starting position will be incorporated in the fantasy points awarded for finishing position only.  

Seven golfers who started outside the Top 30 in FedEx Cup points at the beginning of the playoffs advanced themselves into the Tour Championship field.  Abraham Ancer started the playoffs sitting at 67th, but earned his spot this weekend with a second place finish at the Northern Trust.  Four players including Ancer made the field of 30 without winning a tournament on tour this season.  Tommy Fleetwood, rookie Sungjae Im and Jason Kokrak were the other three.  The player with the hightest spot on the FedEx Cup standings before the playoffs to not make the Tour Championship was Shane Lowry.  He started at 20th but finished 33rd after finishing T52 & T48 in the first two events.  Don't feel bad for him, he's stil going back to Ireland to kiss his Claret Jug.

East Lake is a par 70 that measures out 7,346 yards.  Once again the 9th hole will play as the 18th and the 18th will play as the 9th for the golfers to finish their rounds on a par 5 instead of the par 3.  This course is the largest par 70 course on the tour excluding major championship tracks.  Knowing the way this tournament is set up with "Starting Strokes", those players playing from behind will have to take more risk and shoot for those eagle and birdie opportunities. The test of this course gets more difficult around the greens.  Players hit the greens in regulation on average 11 or 12 times per round which is pretty close to average on tour even in the tiniest field of the season.

Lets get into the example lineups...