TOUR Championship results: Jordan Spieth caps incredible season with FedExCup title

Jason Day’s recent run, which included four wins in six starts, has been amazing to watch. But Sunday was a fitting end to the PGA Tour season.

Jordan Spieth capped a year full of new records by becoming the youngest player ever to win the FedExCup and the TOUR Championship. It was his fifth win of the year, joining Day a week later to become the fourth player in the last 20 years to post that many wins in a single season. He’s also the youngest five-time winner since Horton Smith, who smacked it around in 1929.

Day’s strong finish and rise to No. 1 in the world provoked a trendy argument that he could be Player of the Year if he won again this weekend and took the FedExCup. It was at least an argument, but it felt like one of those late-season debates that filled air time and neglected all the work Spieth had done. Fortunately, Spieth removed all doubt and took home almost $11.5 million in purse and bonus money in a single day. He also broke the single-season money record and got to over $12 million in earnings with this TOUR Championship win.

Spieth’s worst stretch of golf in this astonishing year came in these FedExCup Playoffs. He missed the cut in the first two legs of the playoffs in New Jersey and Boston and it seemed his year was going to come to a sputtering finish. But Spieth had accrued enough FedExCup points with that dominant regular season to stay inside the top five in the standings throughout the playoffs, even with those two ugly missed cuts. That top five position meant all he needed to do was win the TOUR Championship to take the overall FedExCup.

So Spieth saved his best rounds of the playoffs for the most important time, rocketing to the top of the leaderboard on Saturday afternoon with a birdie putt on the 18th hole.

That putt closed out a third round 68 and put him one shot ahead of Henrik Stenson, who had never not had a lead after playing six rounds in the TOUR Championship. The course obviously suits Stenson well -- he won the FedExCup here two years ago and started this week with an 8-under round that put him comfortably in front.

But as soon as Spieth took that lead late on Saturday, Stenson was done. Spieth showed up on Sunday and put him on the mat early, never providing an opening and cruising down the back nine with a multi-shot cushion. He bombed in a 47-foot putt at the 11th hole that left Stenson smirking. These were the kind of putts we watched all season from the 22-year-old.

His back-to-back missed cuts were dispiriting and the closest we saw all year to an approximation of a slump. The FedExCup doesn’t always go to the best player of the year, but Spieth is a deserving recipient of that $10 million check. On Monday morning, he’ll also be No. 1 again in the updated world rankings.

In a season full of 20-something stars winning on Tour and solidifying how the post-Tiger era will look, Spieth was the clear leader of this transitional year. The FedExCup title is obviously not as important as his Masters title and U.S. Open win, but it’s definitely an appropriate end to the year of Spieth.

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Here are your final results from the TOUR Championship:

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