2022 FedEx St. Jude Championship: Top 10 Power Rankings
After 48 regular season events, it’s playoff time.
The first of three FedEx Cup Playoffs events is this week at the FedEx St. Jude Championship at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tennessee.
It’s the first year Memphis has hosted a playoff event. From 1959-2018 it hosted the St. Jude Classic and from 2019-2021 it hosted a World Golf Championship event.
The top 125 players from the FedEx Cup standings earned their way into this week’s field. Top 70 in the standings advance to next week’s BMW Championship.
TPC Southwind has hosted the PGA Tour since 1989.
The course was designed by Tom Prichard with consultation from pro golfers Hubert Green and Fuzzy Zoeller.
It currently plays to a par 70 at 7,244 yards with a 75.5 course rating and 149 slope rating. TPC Southwind boasts 94 bunkers and 10 water hazards, and usually ranks as a top-third difficult course on the schedule.
The two par-5s tend to play as the two easiest on the course. Players who can score well on these holes, make birdies on the easier front nine, and avoid the big numbers on the back will contend.
Length is not a requisite to win at TPC Southwind, but it is an advantage as long as you’re staying on dry land. Strokes gained approach is more important due to the small greens in play.
Zoysia grass covers tee boxes, fairways, and rough, with Champion Bermuda on the greens.
The weather forecast predicts some rain early in the week but dry for tournament rounds with temperatures in the 60s-80s and not too much wind to deal with.
Let’s get down to the top 10 picks to win this week:
It was tempting to push Joohyung “Tom” Kim higher up the FedEx St. Jude power rankings. I didn’t want to be overzealous, but what this 20-year-old South Korean rising star is doing is incredible.
He became the second youngest player (20 years, 1 month, 17 days) since World War II to win a PGA Tour event when he prevailed at last week’s Wyndham Championship. Jordan Spieth was just shy of his 20th birthday when he won the 2013 John Deere Classic.
Kim also became the first player in PGA Tour history to win a tournament after beginning with a quadruple bogey. He quickly bounced back from that blunder to salvage a 67 on Thursday.
Kim got into contention with a Friday 64, hung around with a Saturday at 68, and made it a runaway when he posted 8-under on the front nine en route to a closing 9-under 61.
His opening 27 tied the PGA Tour’s second lowest nine-hole score.
It was truly a week of superlatives.
“I told myself from the start of the week, just have fun, enjoy it, you’ve got your card already, just enjoy every single moment of it and just have fun and just don’t get too intense about it,” Kim was transcribed by Tee Scripts. “But this back nine was crazy, it was probably the most intense round I’ve played. My putter felt like 200 pounds today.”
Kim mentioned he already had his PGA Tour card for next season. He recently received a special temporary exemption on the PGA Tour, meaning he had earned enough FedEx Cup points that would have put him in the top 125 of last year’s FedEx Cup standings.
Kim contended at the Genesis Scottish Open where he took solo third. He made the cut at The Open Championship, played well at the 3M Open, and added a top-10 at the Rocket Mortgage Classic.
However, Kim was ineligible for the playoffs given he was a non-member. The only way to get into this week’s field at the FedEx St. Jude Championship was to win in Greensboro. And he did it.
Kim led the field in birdies (25) and total strokes gained putting (12.546).
He doesn’t have enough rounds logged in the PGA Tour season to qualify for statistical rankings. If he did, Kim would come in at 14th in total strokes gained per round (1.391).
He’s also gaining .88 strokes per round tee to green and is absolutely flushing the ball right now.
TPC Southwind is another new course for Kim to learn. It’ll be his sixth straight week of competition, so I do think fatigue will keep him from winning back-to-back.
Nevertheless, you can’t fully slow down Thomas the Tank Engine, as he’s nicknamed after. He’ll reel in his third straight top-10 and position himself to make a run to East Lake.