Not for the first time in the PGA Tour season, Collin Morikawa came second to Scottie Scheffler in the final round of a tournament, this time as the World No.1 eased to victory at the Tour Championship to claim his maiden FedEx Cup title.
Despite that, Morikawa, who was also runner-up to Scheffler at the Memorial Tournament, can take some consolation from the fact he finished top of the Official World Golf Ranking leaderboard for the event following his efforts at East Lake.
That’s because of the scoring system in place at the Tour Championship, where Scheffler began with a two-shot lead, and Morikawa began six off the pace.
In the end, Morikawa finished four shots adrift of Scheffler in his bid for the FedEx Cup title, but he actually outperformed him by two over the four rounds, with Sahith Theegala finishing just one shot worse off than Morikawa.
Following the event, the two-time Major winner admitted that he was taking the silver lining of knowing that, without starting strokes, he would have won the tournament.
He said: “Yeah, it's nice. I knew that was kind of the goal for the week, right, to come out on top on this kind of fake leaderboard and see how things played out. Ultimately Scottie was second or third on that leaderboard, so it didn't really help my case.”
Still, Morikawa could see the funny side, later joking in an Instagram post: "Signed up for the gross division, forgot to sign up for the net."
On a more serious note, the FedEx Cup Playoffs format has had some criticizm from pros, including Scheffler, who, before the FedEx St. Jude Championship, described it as “silly” and added: “You can't call it a season-long race and have it come down to one tournament.”
A benefit of the scoring system for the Tour Championship is that it offered everyone a chance of glory, even the player beginning in 30th only 10 shots off the leader at the start.
Regardless, Morikawa admitted that making up the six-shot deficit he faced at the start was a tall order, but he was ultimately just happy to perform well throughout the tournament. He continued: “I knew six shots was a lot to catch up, but I know I've made it up before. It was just nice to put together four good rounds throughout a week.”
Morikawa’s performance, which earned him $12.5m, completed an encouraging season that took him firmly back inside the world’s top five after slipping to 20th heading into last year’s Tour Championship.
Despite that improvement, he has tended to come up short in the final round of tournaments, including finishing T3 at The Masters and T4 at the PGA Championship, after beginning the Sunday of each Major firmly in contention for victory. That’s something he admitted he needs to improve in the future.
“I've got to start playing better, better final rounds. That's what it comes down to,” he explained. “It's not like I had to do anything special in a handful of those rounds. It's not like - I didn't have to shoot 63s to win.
“I was in these final groups, I don't know how many final groups I was in this year, but enough to where I can think of a few easily off the top of my head, and when you can do that, you hope to think of the wins.”
