TOUR Championship 2015: Tee times, pairings for Thursday’s first round

The interminable PGA Tour season comes to a close this weekend in Atlanta, where the TOUR Championship, the fourth leg of the FedExCup, tees off on Thursday. There are just 30 invitations to this finale, making it the smallest and most exclusive event on the entire schedule.

Those who qualify and get over that top-30 cutoff in the FedExCup points earn a host of perks and exemptions for the next season, including an invite to the Masters. This event, of course, does not have the weight or cache of a major championship but it’s a fine way to end the season with almost every world-class talent in attendance.

In addition to being the smallest, this is also just about the easiest tournament of the season to hold and keep on track. There’s not some unwieldy 156-man field that needs to play 36 holes before Saturday, or even the modest 70-man fields of the no-cut WGC events.

There’s an incredible amount of flexibility with just 15 tee times on the tee sheet. An extreme weather disruption over multiple days would seem to be the only thing that could knock this off schedule significantly. With all the cushion from the small field, the tour will wait until almost noon on Thursday to send the first group off to the No. 1 tee.

Even at last week’s BMW Championship, which has only 70 players, they still put the players in groups of three and sent them off two tees for the first round. That would obviously be ridiculous and unnecessary with this extremely small field, so everyone plays from the first tee into the clubhouse.

The other change for the finale is that groups are set for the first round only, as opposed to the static Thursday-Friday pairings at every other event on the schedule. The first day’s tee sheet is organized according to FedExCup points, which means Jason Day and Jordan Spieth will play together for the fourth straight week.

Between the final round of the PGA Championship, and the first two rounds of the last three FedExCup events, those two have gotten to know each other real well in this finishing stretch. But after Thursday, they may be split up -- that’s because in this 30-man finale, the tour immediately re-pairs them in the second round, according to score.

Spieth and Day will anchor things at 2 p.m. and with such a relatively clear course, expect these rounds to all come in right at or even just under four hours. The broadcast on Golf Channel is scheduled to end at 6 p.m. and I would expect Spieth and Day -- barring a weather delay -- to be done before that.

The only player qualified who will not be teeing it up is Jim Furyk, who showed up at last week’s BMW Championship with a wrist injury. He tried to play in Chicago but withdrew early in his first round and then did the same in Atlanta on Tuesday, putting his Presidents Cup in jeopardy.

With Furyk gone, and scheduled to play right in the middle of the tee sheet, the tour opted to put a playing marker out in his place with Hideki Matsuyama. The marker is Ollie Schniederjans, an local and Georgia Tech alum, who turned pro in late July after impressive showings at both the U.S. Open and British Open as an amateur. They’re off at 12:50 p.m. ET.

Here’s the full tee sheet for the opening round (all times ET):

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