How Scottie Scheffler will win more money this week — than the Tour event purse

Scottie Scheffler is off this week. He might be at home. He might be readying for next week’s PGA Tour stop, the FedEx St. Jude Championship. What exactly he’s doing instead of playing is unclear. But this interestingly isn’t:

He’ll earn $8 million at the end of the Tour’s Wyndham Championship, his biggest check of the year (to this point). Notably, that’s $6,578,000 more than the Wyndham winner will make ($1,422,000). And $100,000 more than the entire purse ($7.9 million). All of which raises a question:

By playing extremely well when he has played.

With one week left in the Tour’s regular season, Scheffler has built an insurmountable lead in the Tour’s season-long points standings, giving him the $8 million top prize through the program that rewards the standings’ top 10 (the aptly named Comcast Business Top 10). The Wyndham awards 500 points to the winner — and Scheffler has a 1,936-point advantage over the pro in second, Xander Schauffele, who’s also not playing this week.

1, Scottie Scheffler, 5,993

2, Xander Schauffele, 4,057

3, Rory McIlroy, 2,545

4, Collin Morikawa, 2,456

5, Wyndham Clark, 2,154

6, Ludvig Aberg, 2,092

7, Sahith Theegala, 2,037

8, Hideki Matsuyama, 1,899

*9, Sungjae Im, 1,883

*10, Shane Lowry, 1,867

11, Patrick Cantlay, 1,780

12, Byeong Hun An, 1,755

13, Russell Henley, 1,671

14, Tony Finau, 1,635

*15, Akshay Bhatia, 1,610

16, Matthieu Pavon, 1,569

*17, Robert MacIntyre, 1,535

18, Sepp Straka, 1,498

19, Justin Thomas, 1,445

20, Tom Hoge, 1,441