Collin Morikawa, Keegan Bradley Rocket Up Leaderboard at Tour Championship

The FedEx finale's format gives a head start to the season's top players, but Morikawa and Bradley made up ground on Thursday at East Lake.

ATLANTA — Collin Morikawa’s objective starting the week at the Tour Championship was to simply shoot the lowest score he could and do his best to be lower than anyone else through 72 holes.

Now it’s time to readjust that mindset.

After making seven birdies and an eagle to at East Lake Golf Club to shoot 9-under-par 61, one behind Zach Johnson’s 2007 course record, the two-time major champion can now dream about winning the FedEx Cup title.

Such are the nuances of the strokes-adjusted format for the final event of the PGA Tour’s 2022-23 season, which saw him start nine strokes back of leader Scottie Scheffler, who struggled in the opening round.

Morikawa, Keegan Bradley and Viktor Hovland share the lead after the first round. Bradley shot 63 and Hovland, who won on Sunday at the BMW Championship, shot 68, having started the day in second place.

"You can look at it both ways," said Morikawa, who trailed Scheffler by eight strokes at the start of the day. “I've heard both sides of we like it, we don't like it.

"But at the end of the day, if you play really good golf for four rounds and you win the tournament without the strokes, I mean, you can't be too mad about yourself, right? You played some good golf and you beat 29 other guys and that's kind of the goal this week. That was the goal at the beginning of the week, but obviously where I sit now, it's to keep pushing and not let my foot off the gas."

At 24th in the FedEx Cup standings starting the week, Morikawa was assigned a strokes-adjusted starting point of -1. Scheffler, the leader in points, was given -10, with Hovland in second at -8, Rory McIlroy in third, despite a back injury, at -7 and Jon Rahm in fourth at -6.

The strokes allotments go down to the end of the 30-player field, with those in 26th through 30th positions starting at even par.

The idea is to reward those who have had the best seasons on the PGA Tour by giving them a small head start on attempting to earn the $18 million bonus that goes to the winner at the end of this week.

Scheffler’s advantage is now gone, but if this were any other week, he’d be 10 shots back of Morikawa. Instead his 72 left him just one back of the tournament co-leaders.

This is the format that has been in use since 2019. The previous year, Tiger Woods won the Tour Championship for his 80th PGA Tour victory while Justin Rose won the FedEx Cup. That scenario could not occur today.

“I can happily say I've been on both sides of it," said Xander Schauffele, who won the Tour Championship in 2017 when Justin Thomas was the FedEx winner and also shot the low 72-hole score in 2020 when Dustin Johnson won the FedEx Cup. Schauffele was credited with a victory in 2017; but not in 2020.

“I've never won the whole thing, but I've won this event and I was given a trophy and I've won it and was not … I haven't thought of a way to make it better. I still believe that when I talk to some friends and people they still feel like a little confused on how it all happens. I think this is supposed to be like our most important event all year. It kind of comes down to this moment. And, like, for people to be like a little bit confused, it's still not a finished product to me in that sense.

“But I think after Thursday and after Friday, like everyone knows. Like it doesn't even matter anymore how it started, it's all about how you finish it. And everyone knows what's going on when guys are coming down this nice final stretch here at East Lake and everyone knows what's at stake."

For a time on Thursday, Scheffler appeared to be making a mockery of the situation. Starting with a two-shot advantage, he played the first nine holes in 2 under and had a five-shot advantage through 10 holes.

But bogeys at the 11th and 12th holes made things interesting with Morikawa and Bradley shooting up the leaderboard. And then he hit his tee shot in the water at the par-3 15th, leading to a triple-bogey 6.

That suddenly made the tournament very interesting, regardless of how the players started.

"It’s strange," Bradley said. “I was saying earlier, I looked up at the leaderboard at one point today and I thought they had my score wrong because I started at 3 under and I think I was 3 under for the day, and I was like, that's not right, and then I realized it's my first time playing this format.

“But if I'm looking at what Scottie Scheffler's doing on Thursday, whether we're starting at even or he's whatever ahead, I'm going to be in trouble anyways. So I'm trying to go out there, as hard as it is, I'm trying to play each hole individually, each shot, all the cliches."

Things look very different now for both Morikawa and Bradley, who won the Travelers Championship in June and is still in the running for an at-large pick for the U.S. Ryder Cup team. So is Morikawa, who has not won in each of the past two years, his last victory coming at the 2021 DP World Tour Championship.

“It's been another frustrating and up-and-down year, but he (caddie J.J. Jakovac) looked at me on Sunday last week and just said, 'look, let's just go and have fun.’ It's not easy it to make it here. I can't take it for granted that I I'm here again. I had to grind my butt off to get here again, play well in playoffs, have a couple finishes. Like, it's not easy. There's a reason why only 30 guys make it.

“So you have an opportunity. Rory was 11 back last year (early in the first round and went on to win the FedEx Cup) after so many holes. Like, it's doable. So you got to play some good golf and that's what he did last year. But the way the game felt today, it's just like how do we just continue that and how do we keep that for three more days."