As Scottie Scheffler finished off his sixth win of the season on Sunday at the Procore Championship — a tournament he entered to stay sharp for next week’s Ryder Cup — Lanto Griffin was overcome with emotions thinking about where he has been and what could have been.
Griffin, a 37-year-old pro, ruptured his L5-S1 disc in 2020 and had to undergo a microdiscectomy in 2022. Last season, Griffin had just one top 10 in 22 starts. He finished 158th in the FedEx Cup Fall standings but won PGA Tour Q-School to retain his full PGA Tour membership.
Griffin’s 2025 season was rocky. He finished T9 at the Farmers Insurance Open and then missed four of his next six cuts.
“Sometimes when you work hard and work on the wrong stuff you get worse, and that’s kind of what happened,” Griffin said on Sunday, after he shot 65 to finish solo third. “My work ethic hasn’t changed. I kind of went down the wrong path and it went backwards.”
After withdrawing from the Corales Puntacana Championship, Griffin went back to his old coach, Todd Anderson, at TPC Sawgrass. He also started working with Alex Bennett, director of athletic performance. A T14 at the Barracuda and T23 at the season-ending Wyndham Championship put Griffin 142nd in the standings entering the FedEx Cup Fall and needing some magic to crack the top 100 to maintain his fully exempt status.
The California native opened with a seven-under 65 at the Procore Championship Thursday and followed with rounds of 70 and 71. He entered Sunday’s final round six shots off the pace set by 54-hole leader Ben Griffin, but he birdied six of his first eight holes to make the turn in 30 and put himself in the mix to win his first tournament since the 2019 Houston Open. Griffin made two more birdies on the back to finish 17 under, two shots behind the mark set by Scheffler.
Griffin’s hot Sunday vaulted him to 98th in the FedEx Cup Fall standings, just inside the number to keep his card … at the moment.
“It’s huge,” Griffin told NBC’s Kira K. Dixon after the round. “One of my goals this week was to give myself a shot [to get into the Baycurrent Classic]. Hopefully, I’ll get in there now, and we have [six] tournaments left. Obviously, you want to win but keeping your job … I went to Q School last year and somehow won and extended the life [of my career]. This week, somehow, it all came together. Going to come up a little bit short.
“Kind of wish Scottie wasn’t here but I know all the fans enjoyed it. Just proud of myself. … Playing good golf is so much fun and playing bad golf is pretty brutal on your psyche. I’ve put a lot of hard work in these last five weeks since Wyndham, so it’s kind of nice to see it come together.”
Scheffler and runner-up Ben Griffin, the only players to finish ahead of Lanto Griffin, were two of the 10 U.S. Ryder Cup players in the field, which added juice to a normally sleepy fall event. Although Lanto Griffin’s emotional interview and his open acknowledgement that having Scheffler in the field highlights an issue the PGA Tour will eventually have to solve.
When new CEO Brian Rolapp spoke at the Tour Championship, he talked about the need for the PGA Tour to abide by his three guiding principles: competitive parity, scarcity and simplicity. Rolapp comes from the NFL, and one thing the NFL does better than every other sports league is create narratives that are easy for fans to follow and become invested in.
With that as our guide, let’s look at the FedEx Cup Fall slate, Lanto Griffin and what happened at the Procore Championship.
As it’s currently constructed, the FedEx Cup Fall serves two purposes: it’s a vehicle for players who finished outside the top 50 in the FedEx Cup to try to play their way into the first two Signature Events of the following season, and it shapes the membership of the Tour for the following season.
If Rolapp is looking for simplicity in his product, Sunday’s affairs in Napa would have been much easier to digest and understand without Scheffler, Ben Griffin and the rest of Team USA in the field. The stakes would have been more clearly defined if those in the field were either playing to extend their careers or elevate their standing on Tour. Instead, the 2025 Procore was a mashup of the PGA Tour’s longstanding status quo and the purgatorial state it has found itself in since reshaping on the fly following LIV Golf’s arrival.
Rolapp, who hammered the importance of competing for and winning people’s attention in the doom-scrolling era, promised to make significant changes where they are needed. If he’s looking to follow his old employer’s model, cleaning up the FedEx Cup Fall slate to make it more easily digestible for the masses is a good place to head — after he finds a way to create a postseason model that all sports fans can understand and follow.
If the stakes of the FedEx Cup Fall were more clearly defined, the product would be elevated. It’s easy for people to understand that Player X needs to win to keep his job and Player Y needs to do Z to become eligible for the marquee events. But things become muddy when you have X and Y happening while top players occasionally show up to play to collect a paycheck, make good on sponsorship deals or, in this case, prep for an event that the PGA Tour doesn’t even own.
All of that leads to the question you don’t want people asking: What does this mean?
Sunday’s events in Napa could have been filled with high drama, as Griffin tried to get his second career win over the line while others trying to claw their way back up chased after him. Instead, we got a fun duel between Scheffler and Ben Griffin that ended with the World No. 1 taking home another trophy, talking about how prepared he feels for the Ryder Cup and being unwilling to commit to returning to Napa for his title defense. Which makes sense given that he normally doesn’t play the event.
Rolapp has a lot on his plate as he looks under the hood and tries to polish and fine-tune the PGA Tour product with his three principles as his guiding light. But as he starts to deliver “significant change,” the events in wine country are a good example of how pro golf can make its product easier to understand and more attractive to both the die-hard golf fan and the casual sports fan: Clearly define the stakes, craft a narrative that’s easy to follow and use the simplicity, scarcity and competitive parity of this part of the schedule to your advantage.
