Scottie Scheffler has won one tournament this season and not one major. Still, the world No. 1 starts the FedEx Cup Playoffs on Thursday, Aug. 13 at the TPC Southwind as the favorite anyway.

That is the kind of year it has been on the PGA Tour.

Scheffler has five runner-up finishes and 11 top-fives in 17 starts. He missed one cut and did not win a major a year after winning two. He is still listed as the favorite at +445 at DraftKings Sportsbook.

The FedEx Cup is the Tour’s season-long points race. Players collect points all year, and the standings decide who keeps playing in August. Sixty-nine of the top 70 are at TPC Southwind this week for a $20 million purse. Only the top 50 in points Sunday night move on to the BMW Championship outside of St. Louis. Everyone else is done for the year.

Rory McIlroy is here after skipping the event a year ago. Tommy Fleetwood, who won the FedEx Cup last season, is ninth. Justin Rose, who won this tournament last August, is 46th and back to defend it. Jackson Koivun is just 21 years old and played his way in to what will be his fifth tournament as a pro.

Here are five things to watch this week at TPC Southwind.

Rory McIlroy is playing this year

McIlroy won the Masters in April, his second green jacket in a row and the sixth major of his career. Only Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo had gone back to back at Augusta before him. He has barely been seen since. He entered 11 tournaments that count toward the standings, but none since the British Open in July, and sits 12th in the field. He enters this tournament outside the top 10 for the first time since 2021. Nobody has won the Fed Ex Cup more than his three times.

McIlroy skipped it last year because the standings let him. He had banked enough points to sit out and still advance to the next round, passing on a tournament with a $3.6 million winners check. It created some backlash. Peter Malnati, a player on the Tour’s policy board, said that week he was “very concerned” about stars sitting out. Golf writers started calling the fix the “Rory Rule.” This year he needs to play, is confirmed in the field and still, the talk is about his sparse schedule in 2026.

Jackson Koivun made it in five starts as a pro

Koivun was still an amateur in June. He tied for 23rd at the U.S. Open, turned pro, missed his first cut and then won the 3M Open in Minnesota in his third start, beating Scheffler by three shots. Two starts later, he was qualified for the playoffs. Only Tiger Woods made it as fast. The 21-year-old rookie also got the last playoff spot, No. 70, and needed par on the final hole at the Wyndham Championship Sunday to make it.

There’s more on the line for him than checks and points.

Brandt Snedecker captains the U.S. team at the Presidents Cup in September, the match play event against a team of international players, and will make six picks after next week. Koivun has two tournaments to make a good impression.

Who is not here

Keegan Bradley had made the playoffs 15 straight years. Jason Day had made 18. Both streaks ended last week at the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C. Tony Finau’s run of 11 ended there too.

Steve Fisk won the ISCO Championship in July, then missed the cut in each of his last three starts and finished 71st, one spot outside the field. Daniel Berger qualified 60th and did not enter. He has not said why and has not played since the British Open. There is no alternate list, so the field just dropped to 69.

Brooks Koepka returned to the PGA Tour this year from the Saudi-funded LIV Golf league and finished 93rd.

50 players survive Sunday

The top 50 in points advance to the BMW Championship next week. They also lock up spots in all eight signature events next season, the limited-field tournaments with the biggest purses. Miss that cut and the year ends Sunday.

Jordan Spieth is 54th, Sungjae Im is 53rd, Max Homa 52nd and Harris English 51st, 27 points behind Maverick McNealy for the last spot. The winner Sunday get 750 points.

Memphis has just two of these left

The Tour is rebuilding its schedule for 2028 around a top-level Championship Series of 23 to 24 events for it’s best-rated players, plus a lower Challenger Series of about 20 tournaments that feeds into it. It spent more than a week announcing which cities made the top tier. Memphis, which has hosted a Tour event since 1958, was not on the list.

A spot on the lower tier is still possible.

Memphis was handed elevated status in 2019 only because the Tour lost is sponsor at Firestone in Ohio and needed somewhere to put the event, and it became the playoff opener in 2022 when a different sponsor walked away. The FedEx deal that pays for the tournament, the points race and the playoffs expires at the end of next year.