Seamus Power may be guaranteed a PGA Tour card for the 2025 season thanks to his victory in the Butterfield Bermuda Championship in late 2022 – part of the 2023 PGA Tour season – which carried with it an exemption through 2025, but the Waterford man sits outside the all-important top-50 in the FedEx Cup rankings which means he’s set to miss out on automatic qualification for the Signature Events next year.
Coming into the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the first of the three-season ending Playoff events, as the 66th ranked player in the 70-man field, the minimum requirement to climb into the top 50 and take his place in the field for next week’s BMW Championship, is a top-10 finish, but even that may not be enough depending on how others ranked 51-70 fare.
It’s a huge ask, particularly when you consider that his best previous course finish is 12th place in 2018 and Jordan Spieth, 2023 FedEx Cup champion Viktor Hovland, and Justin Rose are among the big names who are also reliant on a good week to secure their berths.
Shane Lowry and Rory McIlroy are both inside the top-10 arriving at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tennessee, and collect bonus payments of $2 million and $4.8 million respectively through the Comcast Business Tour Top 10 which concluded at the end of the PGA Tour regular season, but such is McIlroy’s deficit to FedEx Cup leader Scottie Scheffler, that he’ll likely need to win both the FedEx St. Jude and BMW Championship if he’s to head to East Lake in pole position and with the two-stroke advantage that the leader enjoys at the Tour Championship.
For Lowry, who has yet to tee it up in the season finale, avoiding disaster and unfortunate circumstance should be enough to see him take his place in the Tour Championship for the first time, but he’s guaranteed to be among the leading 50 who will feature in each of the Signature Events next year.
Lowry finished sixth here in 2020, while McIlroy was fourth in 2019 and third last year.
There is no defending champion as Lucas Glover, who made it back-to-back victories after closing out the regular season with a win at the Wyndham Championship and rode the crest of that wave into Memphis and doubled up, found himself on the outside looking in at the cut off point for the 2024 playoffs.
While last week’s Wyndham Championship was severely disrupted due to Tropical Storm Debbie crashing into Greensboro, North Carolina, better conditions are expected this week though thunderstorms are always possible in the severely humid Tennessee in August.