Scottie Scheffler at the Olympics last week.
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Scottie Scheffler is off this week. He may be at home. He may be preparing for next week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship on the PGA Tour. It’s unclear what he’s doing instead of playing. But the interesting thing is, this is the unknown.
He’ll have $8 million at the end of the tour’s Wyndham Championship, his biggest payday this year. Notably, that’s $6.578 million more than the winner of the Wyndham ($1.422 million) and $100,000 more than his total prize money ($7.9 million). All of this begs the question:
how?
When he plays, he plays very well.
With one week left in the tour’s regular season, Scheffler holds a commanding lead in the tour’s season points standings and has earned himself a top prize of $8 million through a program that awards money to the top 10 players in the standings (Comcast Business Top 10). Wyndham awards 500 points to the winner. Scheffler has a 1,936-point lead over No. 2 pro Xander Schauffele, who is also sitting out this week.
It’s impressive how Scheffler got to this point. He has never missed the cut in 16 starts. He has finished in the top 10 14 times. He has won six times (Arnold Palmer Invitational, Players Championship, Masters, RBC Heritage, Memorial, Travelers Championship). All of this has earned Scheffler $28,148,691 in prize money, which could grow even more with the $8 million in prize money he’s already earned. The next two tournaments will have the two biggest prize money of the year (next week’s FedEx St. Jude and the following week’s BMW Championship both have $20 million in prize money), and the Tour Championship will have the biggest prize money of the year (it’s not officially announced, but last year’s prize money was $75 million).
Below are the top 25 in the standings for the entire season heading into Windham, with players playing this week marked with an asterisk.
1. Scottie Scheffler 5,993
2. Xander Schauffele, 4,057
3. Rory McIlroy, 2,545
4. Collin Morikawa, 2,456
5. Wyndham Clark, 2,154
6. Ludwig Aberg, 2,092
7. Sahith Teegala, 2,037
8. Hideki Matsuyama 1,899
*9, Lim Sung-jae, 1,883
*10. Shane Lowry, 1,867
11. Patrick Cantlay, 1,780
12. Ahn Byung-hun, 1,755
13. Russell Henry, 1,671
14. Tony Finau, 1,635
*15. Akshay Bhatia, 1,610
16. Mathieu Pavone, 1,569
*17 Robert McIntyre, 1,535
18. Sepp Straka, 1,498
19. Justin Thomas, 1,445
20. Tom Hogue, 1,441
*21. Brian Harman, 1,409
*22. Christian Bezuidenhout, 1,370
23. Jason Day, 1,345
*24. Davis Thompson, 1,333
25. Taylor Pendris, 1,324
