Playoff push, desperation underscore drama of Wyndham Championship

The Wyndham Championship has a funny way of setting the table for the FedEx Cup playoffs.
In 2023, Lucas Glover won the regular-season finale to jump from outside the top 110 in the points race into the playoffs. He capitalized by winning the very next week in the playoff opener in Memphis.
The year prior, Tom Kim of South Korea announced himself by winning the Wyndham at 21 years old to qualify for the playoffs.
Some big-name players would like to join that list at the 2025 Wyndham Championship beginning Thursday at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, N.C.
The top 70 players in the FedEx Cup standings after this week will qualify for the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis. The current No. 70 is Matti Schmid of Germany; some notable names right behind him include Danish youngster Nicolai Hojgaard, Keith Mitchell, Chris Kirk and Gary Woodland.
Australian veteran Adam Scott finds himself 85th in the standings and needing a very high finish to leap into the top 70.
“I feel like my game’s been pretty good since May so I need to be on the front foot a little bit, I can’t be sitting back waiting for it to happen,” Scott said. “I’ve got a couple of days to put myself in contention for the weekend. Yeah, I feel confident with my game that I can do that. It’s about executing.”
Scott called Sedgefield “one of the great tracks on tour.” The course has hosted this event since 2008. A par-70, it will play 7,131 yards long this week and test the field with its small greens.
Scott was in a six-man playoff here in 2021, won by Kevin Kisner. It was tied for the largest playoff in PGA Tour history.
“It would be fun to be in the mix this weekend, and also I still have some open wounds from a few years ago in that playoff so it would be fun to change that,” Scott said.
Tony Finau (No. 60) and Rickie Fowler (No. 61) are not guaranteed to make the playoffs, so they’re playing this week in order to maximize their distance from the cutoff line.
Finau and Fowler are also Ryder Cup veterans, and there are only a few opportunities left to impress U.S. captain Keegan Bradley, who has six captain’s picks to make this fall.
There’s a plethora of fresh faces Bradley could consider who have had better seasons than Finau and Fowler. Take Ben Griffin, currently ninth in the U.S. team qualifying standings. Griffin picked up his first two PGA Tour victories this spring and sits seventh in the FedEx Cup race, the highest of anyone in the Wyndham field.
“I feel like (the Ryder Cup) mentioned every single day, so like, it’s always on my mind whether I want it to be or not,” said Griffin, a native of nearby Chapel Hill, N.C. “… If I just do the right things each week, and this week in particular if I play really well and just focus on winning, the byproduct of that’s going to be making the Ryder Cup team, and same with each week in the playoffs. The more I kind of look at rankings or whatever, it’s not going to help me.”
Another Ryder Cup veteran hopeful his game is rounding into form at the right time, Jordan Spieth is a big fan of the August calendar ahead, starting this week.
“It’s one of the better tracks that we play all year,” said Spieth. “Also, as we look ahead to next week, first playoff event, there’s a lot of similarities in this grainy bermuda and stuff like that.”