How Scottie Scheffler will win more money this week — than the Tour event purse

Scottie Scheffler is off this week. He might be at home. He might be readying for next week’s PGA Tour stop, the FedEx St. Jude Championship. What exactly he’s doing instead of playing is unclear. But this interestingly isn’t:

He’ll earn $8 million at the end of the Tour’s Wyndham Championship, his biggest check of the year (to this point). Notably, that’s $6,578,000 more than the Wyndham winner will make ($1,422,000). And $100,000 more than the entire purse ($7.9 million). All of which raises a question:

How?

By playing extremely well when he has played.  

With one week left in the Tour’s regular season, Scheffler has built an insurmountable lead in the Tour’s season-long points standings, giving him the $8 million top prize through the program that rewards the standings’ top 10 (the aptly named Comcast Business Top 10). The Wyndham awards 500 points to the winner — and Scheffler has a 1,936-point advantage over the pro in second, Xander Schauffele, who’s also not playing this week.  

How Scheffler got there is impressive. He missed no cuts in 16 starts. He finished in the top 10 14 times. He won six times (the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the Players Championship, the Masters, the RBC Heritage, the Memorial and the Travelers Championship). All of that has also netted him $28,148,691 in earnings — which will jump with the $8 million check, and could grow even more. The next two events have two of the biggest purses of the year (both the FedEx St. Jude next week and the BMW Championship the following week award $20 million in total), and the Tour Championship hands out the year’s biggest prize. (It hasn’t been officially announced, but last year’s purse was $75 million.) 

Below is a look at the top 25 in the season-long standings heading into the Wyndham. Those playing this week are 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, Ludvig Aberg, 2,092 

7, Sahith Theegala, 2,037 

8, Hideki Matsuyama, 1,899 

*9, Sungjae Im, 1,883 

*10, Shane Lowry, 1,867 

11, Patrick Cantlay, 1,780 

12, Byeong Hun An, 1,755 

13, Russell Henley, 1,671 

14, Tony Finau, 1,635 

*15, Akshay Bhatia, 1,610 

16, Matthieu Pavon, 1,569 

*17, Robert MacIntyre, 1,535 

18, Sepp Straka, 1,498 

19, Justin Thomas, 1,445 

20, Tom Hoge, 1,441 

*21, Brian Harman, 1,409 

*22, Christiaan Bezuidenhout, 1,370 

23, Jason Day, 1,345 

*24, Davis Thompson, 1,333 

25, Taylor Pendrith, 1,324