Rory McIlroy left the PGA FedEx St. Jude Championship with work to do and no real margin for comfort. He finished 66th in the 68-man field at 8 over par after a 2-over 72 in the final round, then said he was still “so far away from where I need to be” before next week’s BMW Championship.
That result matters now because McIlroy was 12th in the FedExCup standings when the week began, and the playoff picture still gives him a route to the 30-man TOUR Championship even after the stumble in Memphis. He is chasing his first FedExCup title since 2022, but the form he showed at TPC Southwind did not look like the start of a clean run into St. Louis.
McIlroy did not break par in any of his four rounds on the par-70 layout, and his numbers told the same story. He was 62nd out of 68 players in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green and 65th in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee, two places where he usually builds rounds instead of chasing them. Even so, there was a late flicker on Sunday: he made five birdies across his final 10 holes, enough to keep the score from drifting further but not enough to change the finish.
He said he had not played competitively since The Open before arriving at TPC Southwind and did not come in with a lot of reps. By the time the week wore on, he said he felt lost with the swing a little bit, and that showed in the kind of holes he faced. When he is working through swing issues, he said, he can lose sight of the target and start making the swing itself more important than the shot. For a player of McIlroy’s level, that is usually where a tournament starts slipping away.
What happens next is already clear. McIlroy said he will head to Bellerive Country Club on Tuesday after a quick trip home, then make adjustments with swing coach Michael Bannon and caddie Harry Diamond before the BMW Championship. He has been there before, finishing T50 at the 2018 PGA Championship, and that familiarity may help. But he also made plain that the bigger issue is not the venue. It is whether he can put enough of his swing back together in time to feel he has any sort of chance at all.
