Now, the wildfire. The report generated as much buzz as was expected. It was reasonable to expect that Scottie Scheffler would top the PIP list this year and take home a further $10M as the prize money. He had won the Masters. He had won the PLAYERS Championship. He has been jailed as well; hours before his second round at the PGA Championship. Yet he came second. “That’s wild to think about,” wrote Flushing It Golf on their social media handle. A similar disbelief was noticeable among most golf fans. “No way Tiger beats Scottie. The dude got arrested and still made his tee time…” wrote another.

Dan Rapaport of Skratch tweeted, “Scottie Scheffler won 9 times, including the Masters and a Gold Medal, got arrested between the first and second round of a major championship, starred in some of the best memes all year, and held world No. 1 for the entirety of 2024… and didn’t win the Player Impact Program.”

“Ridiculous. .it’s way past time for the tour to move on from Tiger Woods. He’s nothing but a ceremonial golfer now,” commented another user. Well, there is no way the 15-time major champion can win it again. PGA Tour is doing away with the much-maligned PIP program that sought to reward players for their popularity. The amount of $100M distributed among the top 20 was slashed to $50M for the top 10 this year.

“Biggest joke and scam in the business. I don’t have to even look at the list to already know that Spieth was somehow in the top 10,” one user wrote. Jordan Spieth, who netted only three top-tens among 22 starts, was fifth raking in $4.5M, more than double what he earned this season ($2,732,591). Well, as for Tiger Woods, a few things might have helped him garner the most spotlight despite playing only a few times in 2024.

Making (some) sense of Tiger Woods’s ‘ridiculous’ PIP victory

But then there was Tiger Woods. Firstly, Woods ‘debuted’ at the Genesis Invitational among considerable media spotlight. It was his first competitive golf in a PGA Tour official event (Hero World Challenge isn’t an official event) since bowing out of the 2023 Masters. On top of it, Woods also launched his apparel line-up, Sun Day Red. Unimpressive as it might have been, it was the talk of the golf town for the better part of February. The 82-time PGA Tour winner also made his 24th consecutive cut at the Masters, a record in the history of professional golf.