The Break He Needed? Rickie Fowler Gifted Playoff Opportunity

Rickie Fowler is in the FedEx Cup playoffs. That was a sentence that would have seemed improbable a meer 48 hours ago after Fowler fired a Friday, 69, at the Wyndham Championship to miss the cut by a single shot.

Rickie came into the week ranked 123rd in the FedEx Cup standings with one final opportunity to return to a postseason which he had so regularly been a part of before missing out for the first time since 2010 last season.

Much like the Wyndham Championship leaderboard itself, Fowler’s precarious position on the FedEx Cup bubble ebbed and flowed over the course of the four days, one moment he was in, the next he was out, and then finally, he was in for good.

The 33-year-old survived the playoff bubble and made it into this year’s playoffs right on the number, 125 in the FedEx Cup standings.

Others were less fortunate, players like Matt Wallace (126) and Austin Smotherman (127) both painfully missed out.

The margins were slim, Rickie Fowler finished on 323.797 points this season, while Wallace finished with 315.820, and Smotherman, who missed out in the most excruciating of circumstances, finished with 314.597 points.

Can Rickie Fowler take advantage of fortuitous break?

Rickie Fowler needed something positive to happen for him as he desperately attempts to rediscover the player he once was.

His last win came in 2019 and his world ranking has been in steady decline since 2017 when he was ranked as the 7th best player in the world.

This season the 33-year-old has missed eight cuts, including two in the last two weeks, and recorded just one top 10 finish for the season. The lone highlight came early in the season at the CJ Cup where Rickie Fowler finished in a share of third place.

With the regular season now done and dusted, the 2015 Players Champion has now gone back-to-back seasons with just one top 10 finish, something which would have been unfathomable just several years ago.

Rickie Fowler was dealt a good hand this week, so the question is; can he now take advantage of it?

The first leg of the 2022 FedEx Cup playoffs will take place in Memphis, Tennessee, next week at the FedEx St. Jude Championship.

Formerly known as the WGC-St. Jude Invitational, and the St. Jude Classic before that, Rickie Fowler has made four appearances in Memphis and three of those have resulted in top 20 finishes.

The nine-time career winner will need a similar or better result this time if he is to advance in this year’s playoffs, but he has certainly been afforded an opportunity to do so, an opportunity which eluded others over the weekend.

Perhaps, Fowler got the break he so badly needed and maybe, just maybe, it’s Rickie Fowlers’ time once again.