The Five: Players with most at stake at The RSM Classic

PGA TOUR pros try their best to think only of what’s immediately in front of them – their next tournament, their next round, their next shot. To go any further is a risk of losing focus that could cost them their biggest goals.

In the regular cadence of a season, it’s doable to avoid thinking too much about the big-picture implications. It will be hard to ignore this week as their PGA TOUR careers hang in the balance.

We’ve reached The RSM Classic, the final event of the FedExCup Fall and the last chance for dozens of golfers to lock up a job on the PGA TOUR in 2025. The top 125 in the FedExCup after this week will have fully-exempt status for next year. The rest will face a harsher reality as they pivot to Q-School, the Korn Ferry Tour or elsewhere. It’s a tournament that will feature as much or more drama along the periphery of the leaderboard as at the top of it. A made or missed cut could be the difference between keeping your card or losing it. The difference between a T36 or T42 might decide it, meaning the tension will remain until the last putt drops.

With the stakes laid out, here are five players with the most at stake at The RSM Classic.

Wesley Bryan

Good golf comes in waves, and Wesley Bryan is riding one of the high tides of his career right now.

His stats show he’s never played more consistently. Bryan is 5-for-5 in cuts made this fall and has registered positive strokes gained on the field in each start. That’s a milestone he has never hit. The closest he came was in the spring of 2017 when he recorded four straight events of positive strokes gained before his lone TOUR victory at the RBC Heritage.

Could this latest run be the start of a sustained resurgence that Bryan maintains into next year? Possibly. Bryan has spoken about how his priorities have shifted with YouTube content creation becoming as important, if not more important than his pro golf career. That has noticeably freed him of the expectations and stress that come with living on the PGA TOUR bubble. Perhaps it’s enough to sustain a second act of his pro career.

You could also view it as a small sequence in a much larger data set that explains Bryan’s career. In that context, the stakes at The RSM Classic become clear: It’s imperative that he capitalizes on his play with a TOUR card. He may never have a better chance.

Bryan enters the week No. 125 in the FedExCup Fall, the last man in if the season ended after Bermuda. Of course, it didn’t. There’s one event remaining, and Bryan has the unavoidable assignment of playing with that pressure on his shoulders. Bryan has not finished inside of the top 125 since 2017. He lost his card officially in 2022 after using the last of his starts on a Major Medical. Since then, he’s played off past champion status, which was good enough to get him into a dozen or so tournaments a year, hardly enough to establish a set schedule.

And what’s undeniable is that a consistent rhythm leads to good form. If Bryan falls outside the top 125, his schedule will remain sparse and choppy, rarely playing more than two weeks in a row until next summer and fall. Bryan’s latest stretch of golf shows how important it can be to roll momentum over.

Bryan might get more recognition for his YouTube persona than his PGA TOUR presence these days, but he’s making the case to be firmly back on your pro golf radar.

Mark Hubbard

The stakes extend beyond the top 125, which Mark Hubbard is comfortably inside. Instead, he’s trying to ensure a spot in the top events of the 2025 TOUR calendar. Hubbard begins the week No. 63 in the FedExCup Fall standings, just outside the Aon Next 10, which will also be finalized at week’s end. Nos. 51-60 in the standings after The RSM Classic will earn a spot in two early-season Signature Events – the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and The Genesis Invitational.

Hubbard doesn’t need to look far to see the importance of playing those tournaments. Hubbard played in last year’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and finished T4, moving him from 66th to 17th in the FedExCup standings. It was Hubbard’s most impactful result of the year and nearly locked up his TOUR card for 2025 entirely. It was also the only Signature Event he played. That’s the upside the Signature Events offer.

Hubbard put together one of the most consistent seasons of anyone on TOUR, making the cut in 25 of 29 events. He rattled off 19 straight made cuts to begin the season, but the lack of more top-end results kept him out of more Signature Events. If he can sneak his way into two next year and capitalize again, it may be a different story.

Hubbard is currently 31 points behind No. 60 Justin Rose, equivalent to a solo-28th finish.

Daniel Berger

Nothing is guaranteed in pro golf. Daniel Berger’s situation is proof.

It’s been anything but a comfortable season for Berger, who before his back injury was competing in the Ryder Cup and contending in major championships. Now he’s sweating the final week of the FedExCup Fall.

That’s life for the four-time TOUR winner. After the 2022 U.S. Open, he stepped away from competitive golf to address debilitating back pain. He consulted multiple doctors, opted not to get surgery, and spent more than a year rehabbing to let his body “heal itself.” He has steadily knocked off the rust as the season has progressed, but he remains outside the top 125 at No. 127.

Berger is in good form. He’s made the cut in his last five events, including two top 20s. His latest, a T20 at the World Wide Technology Championship, briefly moved him inside the top 125 before a bad weekend at Bermuda dropped him back out.

It will come down to the wire for Berger, who is just 13 points back of No. 125 Bryan. That’s the equivalent of a solo 43rd.

Adrien Dumont de Chassart

The 2023 Korn Ferry Tour Rookie of the Year, Adrien Dumont de Chassart looked destined to return there until a T3 finish at the Butterfield Bermuda Championship resuscitated he’s chances of retaining a TOUR card.

The Illinois product jumped from No. 175 to No. 142 in the FedExCup standings, well in position to earn conditional PGA TOUR status, at the minimum. But conditional status isn’t what it used to be, promising only a topsy-turvy campaign, contingent on others to decide your schedule.

In 2024, the earliest any golfer made it into a tournament based on their conditional status was the Mexico Open at Vidanta in March. Others had to wait until the Texas Children’s Open at the end of March. That’s a hard way to regain a TOUR card, especially as a young pro in search of a rhythm.

Dumont de Chassart has shown he has the talent to compete on TOUR. He notably joined the Korn Ferry Tour midway through the 2023 season, only to win in his first start and lose in a playoff in his second. It was a rapid rise for one of the top collegiate players of his class and signaled good things to come. Those haven’t come to fruition on TOUR, though his showing in Bermuda may indicate he finally turned a corner.

The reality is Dumont de Chassart’s spot in this exercise could have been given to anybody between Nos. 126-150, but the 23-year-old Belgian is the most intriguing name of the bunch.

Dumont de Chassart is 107 FedExCup Fall points behind No. 125 Wesley Bryan, equivalent to a solo-fifth finish.

Christo Lamprecht

Christo Lamprecht will be watching a different leaderboard entirely this week. While everyone is playing for their PGA TOUR cards, Lamprecht is attempting to lock up Korn Ferry Tour status through a seldom discussed pathway.

There’s a little-known ranking called the PGA TOUR University Total Points, on which the top three will secure exempt 2025 Korn Ferry Tour membership. The ranking includes both FedExCup points and Korn Ferry Tour points, weighted equally.

No. 2 in this year’s PGA TOUR University Ranking, Lamprecht struggled in his half-season on the Korn Ferry Tour. He finished outside the top 100 of the Points List, losing fully exempt status on the Korn Ferry Tour. But with his T23 in Bermuda last week, Lamprecht moved to No. 5 in the PGA TOUR University Total Points standings. He’s in the field at The RSM Classic as a sponsor exemption.

The Georgia Tech product is now just 11.5 points from jumping into the top three and securing a full season on the Korn Ferry Tour. Lamprecht needs a two-way T44 or better to overtake Greaser.

It’s another reminder that everyone is playing for something.