PGA TOUR: Cameron Champ leads Fall Swing’s most dominant players

Cameron Champ, the PGA TOUR’s best and brightest new face, just made his biggest leap in the fall portion of the 2018-19 season. Who else is looking to make an impact in the new season? These ten players were among the most dominant over the past two months.

The fall tour schedule is, in many respects, the PGA Tour’s version of summer school. While most of the game’s stars are away, events wedged between the Tour Championship in late September and the Christmas break enable second-tier pros and tour newcomers to hone their resumes mostly in lower-visibility situations.

There are a handful of exceptions – notably the $10 million WGC-HSBC Champions played in November in Shanghai – but for the most part the fall Tour events draw fields populated by hopefuls rather than stars. The 30 competitors for the Tour Championship at East Lake played only a combined 60 fall tour events, and a third of those were at the HSBC. Ten of the 30 East Lake finalists did not play in a fall tour event other than the HSBC, if they even made that one.

Accepting the fall tour events as a proving ground, the next logical question is: Which players proved themselves? The FedEx Cup standings provide one answer to that question by its ranking of players. But the FedEx Cup formula has several flaws, the chief one being its failure to penalize players for poor performances. We’ll dive deeper on that in a moment.

At the moment, Charles Howell sits atop the FedEx Cup standings with 597 points, three more than Xander Schauffele.  Both men have enjoyed success on the fall tour, but both have also benefited greatly by the quirks and inequities in the FedEx point system.