ATLANTA – Justin Rose talked Wednesday about the volatility of the new format of the Tour Championship and noted the points leaders have much less protection than in previous years of the playoff finale.

"If you were leading the FedExCup in the past and you had a poor week, you'd finish maybe second, possibly third in the FedExCup," Rose said. "You have a poor week now, you can finish 12th, 15th, 18th, 20th. So there's a lot more volatility, I think, with this format, which is what playoff golf is all about, I guess."

Rose wasn't spot on with his play on the course this week, but his comments off the course certainly were.

Look no further than Patrick Cantlay. Following a runner-up finish at last week's BMW Championship, Cantlay began the week second in the FedExCup standings, just behind Justin Thomas. As a result, he started the week 8 under, two back of Thomas but still in excellent position to take home the $15 million prize money that came with the FedExCup.

But 8 under was as good as it got for Cantlay, who posted rounds of 70-71-75-73 to plummet all the way down to T-21. He wasn't alone. After beginning the week 14th in the FedExCup standings, Dustin Johnson had an equally disappointing week and fell to T-29 with Lucas Glover.

On the flip side, Jason Kokrak narrowly made it to East Lake as the last man in the field, clinging to the 30th spot in the standings. He took advantage of the week and earned a lot more money than he otherwise would have in previous years.

Kokrak began the week at even par, along with four others rounding out the bottom of top 30, but used rounds of 71-67-72-67 to leap up to finish 14th. In addition, Chez Reavie started T-22 at 1 under but finished eighth at 6 under.

Most players had their own opinion this week when it came to the new staggered-scoring format, and whether they were positive or negative, at least now there's a clearer picture for just how much of a difference a bad – or good – week can make.

ATLANTA – Justin Thomas learned the hard way that starting the week with a lead isn’t as easy as one might think.

As the FedExCup points leader, he began the Tour Championship at 10 under par and two strokes ahead of Patrick Cantlay, who was second on the list, and 10 shots clear of Jason Kokrak, No. 30 in points.

Following an even-par 70 to start the week, that lead had vanished and by the time he closed with a 2-under 68 he found himself five shots behind champion Rory McIlroy, who started the week at 5 under and finished at 18 under.

“It was really weird and hard teeing off on Thursday ahead of everybody,” Thomas said. “I don't know how everybody else feels, but I had a pretty hard time playing the normal way that I play. It's hard to just imagine everybody starts at zero when you don't. So that was tough.”

Thomas finished tied with Brooks Koepka in third place and collected $3.5 million in FedExCup bonus earnings. McIlroy won $15 million.

ATLANTA – Brooks Koepka had just rebounded from Saturday's shaky start to the third round, hitting the reset button Sunday morning and finishing the remaining 13 holes of his suspended round without a bogey. His four Sunday-morning birdies had also helped give him the 54-hole lead.

But things quickly began to escape the Player of the Year frontrunner as the pressure increased in the final round, and Koepka's closing 2-over 72 left him five back of winner Rory McIlroy, who outplayed his playing competitor by six shots Sunday afternoon.

Koepka opened with five straight pars before finally getting a circle on the card at the par-5 sixth, the easiest hole of the week. But a costly double bogey followed at the seventh after Koepka's tee shot sailed out of bounds. He needed two putts to clean up the messy mistake.

One more birdie followed at the eighth, but the real trouble began at the par-4 12th, where Koepka made the first of three straight bogeys.

"Just didn't make any putts," said Koepka, who had 30 on Sunday, his biggest total of the week. "You know, those three-putts I missed kind of right there in a row, 12, 13, 14, kind of took the air out of everything."

With the problems on the green, Koepka also faced issues off the tee, hitting just five fairways Sunday. For as much success and subsequent praise Koepka sees with the big stick, it wasn't working in the final round, and he knew it early.

"It was one of those days where even on the range, I didn't feel very comfortable with the driver," Koepka said. "I felt iron play was good. Just the driver, I just couldn't – it wasn't fading enough. Everything was kind of left, and it happens once in a while.

"I mean, I can't bring it every day."

“In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts. For heavy internet users, repeated interaction with this darkness can become a source of draining negativity . . .

-Cal Newport, author of “Digital Minimalism”

ATLANTA – Between marathon rounds Sunday at the Tour Championship Rory McIlroy said he planned to retreat to his makeshift home for the week and read.

His tome of choice for the finale was “Digital Minimalism.” But before you think the Northern Irishman has jumped the anti-technology shark, consider the circumstances.

“[The book] was lying on the bed the other night, and I was on my phone, and Erica [his wife] said, that's ironic,” McIlroy laughed. “It's just using [technology] the right way, I guess.”

McIlroy’s much-talked-about march to living a mindful and uncluttered life and arguably the most consistent year of his already Hall of Fame career is not mutually exclusive. From the outset of the 2019 season he imagined a better existence not defined by what he does for living but how he lives. The result has been an impressively uncluttered life and the type of clarity you don’t often expect from an elite athlete in his prime.

“Some of the work that I've put in on the mental side of the game and some of the things I've been doing, I definitely think you're starting to see the fruition of that,” McIlroy said at East Lake where he became just the second player, after Tiger Woods, to win the FedExCup twice. “Just a different approach, a little bit of a different attitude. That attitude and that consistency day in, day out, I think that's what you've seen over the course of this year.”

It’s a path McIlroy has been on since the first week of January when he arrived in Maui for the Sentry Tournament of Champions. In ’19 his focus had shifted almost exclusively to the United States along with an attitude that, at least in Tour circles, bordered on Zen-like.

He shrugged off top-five finishes in Maui, the Farmers Insurance Open and the Genesis Open. And when he finished runner-up to Dustin Johnson the following week at the WGC-Mexico Championship, instead of frustration, he went with perspective.

“It was good. Some weeks you play well and someone just plays better,” he reasoned at the time.

Similarly, when he won The Players the following month there was no real outlet moment. There was no reason to make this tournament any less or more important than the next.

It’s the Chuck D lyric: Don’t let a win get to your head or a loss to your heart.

In the darkest moment of ’19, he turned inward to process something he’d never felt. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was anxiety, maybe it was simply too much weight for one man to handle. Whatever it was, McIlroy’s missed cut at The Open – the first played in his homeland in a half century – certainly qualified as a learning moment even for the 30-year-old.

“I learned a lot. Going into that first round at Portrush and trying to treat it like any other day. It’s like going into Sundays and trying to treat it like any other day,” McIlroy said. “You have to be a realist and realize it’s not and you have to prepare for it.”

The more immediate darkness for McIlroy came on Sunday in the form of back-to-back bogeys at Nos. 14 and 15 during the final round at the Tour Championship, which turned what was shaping up to be a nice stroll into something much more tense. That is, until he closed with birdies at the 17^th and 18^th holes for a commanding victory.

The season finale was panned in some circles for the new strokes-based format that seeded the top 30 players based on the playoff points list from 10 under (Justin Thomas) to even par (No. 30 on the list). McIlroy started the week at 5 under par and won by four strokes – or for those tracking at home, three shots without the built-in bonus.

It was an inspired finish for McIlroy, who won the bookends of the "season of championships" – the Tour’s reimagined slate that began in March with The Players and ended on Sunday at the Tour Championship. Brooks Koepka effectively won everything in between.

It all creates a compelling study in how the players view the new season and the FedExCup’s place among the game’s biggest events.

In the next few days, players will vote for the PGA Tour's Player of the Year award, a contest that, until this week, seemed like a foregone conclusion with Koepka having won three times, including the PGA Championship and the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational. But McIlroy added a layer to the conversation with his FedExCup victory, his third this season.

“Rory has outplayed Brooks by a mile in how he's done the entire year. It's unbelievable how he's played,” said Thomas, who tied for third and five strokes back. “But the most important thing is wins and playing great in the big events, and nobody has done that better than Brooks. I don't know how you don't give Brooks the Player of the Year with three wins and a major and a WGC and top four in every major. That's pretty strong.”

McIlroy probably won’t be paying much attention to the voting or anything else that might crop up in his digital universe. He’s aware of the workings of the social media world, as evidenced by his reaction to Phil Mickelson’s most recent shirtless post on Saturday.

“When I got in [the locker room], the first thing I saw was another topless photo of Phil Mickelson, so that made my day,” he joked on Friday following a weather delay.

He’s just not consumed by the flood of digital information, much like he’s not consumed by the predictable ebb and flow of a season, even a season as impressive as 2019.

Early in “Digital Minimalism,” Newport explains the process of stripping away all of one’s electronic distractions: “The declutter acts as a jarring reset: you come into the process a frazzled maximalist and leave an intentional minimalist.”

There’s no way of knowing exactly where McIlroy might be on that spectrum, but on the path to living a mindful life, it’s impossible to separate the player from the person. It’s clear that both made huge strides in 2019.

ATLANTA – Among the various motivations Rory McIlroy had Sunday at the Tour Championship – the most compelling being the $15 million bonus for winning the FedExCup – was the race for the season’s lowest scoring average.

McIlroy led the Tour in adjusted scoring average through The Northern Trust but was overtaken by Patrick Cantlay at last week’s BMW Championship.

“I wanted to win. I 100-percent knew that coming in this week, and I wanted to end the season with the No. 1 stroke average,” said McIlroy, who won the FedExCup for the second time Sunday at East Lake. “There's just little motivating factors that don't have to be about the tournament, but keep you where you need to be.”

McIlroy finished with rounds of 66-67-68-66 and unseated Cantlay in the scoring average race with a 69.05 average, clinching the Vardon Trophy for the first time since 2014 and the third time in his career.