Dustin Johnson in Best Position Ever to Win FedExCup

Despite losing a playoff to Jon Rahm on Sunday, Dustin Johnson is in the best position he’s ever been to capture the FedExCup.

Dustin Johnson is No. 1 in the FedEx standings. He’s also No. 1 in the world rankings, and psychologically, that’s a plus for the Tour Championship. He has a victory and a tie for first in the last two weeks. And being at the top doesn’t seem to bother him.

"“Obviously the goal was to be No. 1 going into East Lake,” he said after the BMW, and he meant No. 1 in FedEx points. “I’m really looking forward to next week and a chance to win the FedExCup.”"

Now we are ready for the big boy throwdown. There are no more points, no more scenarios, and thankfully no more whiteboard calculations. The most successful players of 2020, even COVID interrupted in 2020, are ready to go.

DJ starts at 10-under par. Rahm starts at 8-under. Justin Thomas starts at 7-under, and everyone else is below that. To win the FedExCup, DJ – or anyone else — will have to win the Tour Championship.

The only snag for DJ is that his past performance at EastLake is not what he would like.

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"“I’ve had kind of a mixed bag of tournaments at EastLake,” he said. “I’ve played there a lot. I like the golf course. I either play it really well or I play it horribly.”"

His best finish at the Tour Championship so far was third in 2018, the year of Tiger Woods’ dramatic comeback from back surgery. In his career, DJ has only missed one year, 2014, and his finishes have varied from the third place to 29th, which was where he found himself last season.

Realistically, coming off a victory at Northern Trust in the first leg of the three-tournament PGA Tour finale, it would have been unreasonable to expect him to win the BMW and the Tour Championship. Very few players have won two tournaments in a row, never mind three or more.

However, here’s a hidden DJ stat: He has actually won three starts in a row, back in 2017, but it was not three consecutive weeks. That is much harder, extra hard because of the building pressure.

Before DJ got his three starts in a row, others did it, but none of them were consecutive weeks either: Rory McIlroy (2014), Vijay Singh (2004), Tiger Woods (2000), and David Duval (1997).

Nearly 30 professional golfers have won three starts in a row, going back to Walter Hagen in 1923, but records on some of the older ones can be iffy, so whether they were consecutive weeks and/or consecutive PGA Tour events, except for Byron Nelson, is hard to know. Nelson won every tournament that was played for his 11-in-a-row victories. However, there were breaks in the PGA Tour schedule, so it was not 11 weeks in a row of winning. But it was consecutive events.

Regardless, only four golfers in the last 20 years have done it, and none of those were consecutive starts, so it’s not easy to do.

The likelihood of continuing to hit a small white pellet consistently better than 125, 70, or then 30 other players over three weeks is small. And nerves come into play.

Even DJ gets nervous from time to time, which he admitted after he won the Northern Trust. However, he added that he wasn’t nervous that particular Sunday. it was because he was a gazillion ahead of the golfer closest to him. He didn’t say that was the reason. He just said he wasn’t nervous that Sunday, and the media present knew why and just laughed.

From his standpoint, he finished 1st and tied for 1st the last two weeks. He has one more to go, and he’s not looking for a tie or a playoff loss. He’s looking for the victory.

Certainly, 2020 is DJ’s best chance to win the Cup. Fortunately, he’s getting to the point where he understands what it takes at Eastlake.

"“I feel like the more I play it, the more comfortable I get,” he said at the BMW. “It’s a golf course where, if you drive it straight there, you can shoot good scores, and right now, obviously, I’m driving it pretty straight.”"

In addition, he has grown up playing on Bermudagrass, which is the turf at Eastlake. It’s seldom seen on the PGA Tour where the winter tournaments are in California with poa annua and bentgrass or Riviera’s and Torrey Pines’ Kikuyu grass, over-seeded with rye. The Florida tournaments are also over-seeded with ryegrass. Mid-westerners and North-easterners grow up on bluegrass and/or rye and bent. It’s only Southeast, Southwest, and Texans, players south of I-20, who play Bermuda as their first surface. So the turf is in his favor. If you haven’t played all those surfaces, it’s impossible to explain the difference, but there is one.

Now, anything’s possible over four days of golf, but at least DJ knows his game is trending, and the surface is something he’s played on for decades.

Next. PGA Tour 2K21: A disappointing return to the world of golf video games. dark

Here’s where the top 30 players start:

-10     Dustin Johnson
-8       Jon Rahm
-7       Justin Thomas
-6       Webb Simpson
-5       Collin Morikawa
-4       Daniel Berger, Harris English, Bryson DeChambeau, Sungjae Im, Hideki Matsuyama
-3       Brendon Todd, Rory McIlroy, Patrick Reed, Xander Schauffele, Sebastian Munoz
-2       Lanto Griffin, Scottie Scheffler, Joaquin Niemann, Tyrrell Hatton, Tony Finau
-1       Kevin Kisner, Abraham Ancer, Ryan Palmer, Kevin Na, Marc Leishman
E        Cameron Smith, Viktor Hovland, Mackenzie Hughes, Cameron Champ, Billy Horschel

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