After a wildly entertaining Ryder Cup last week, the PGA TOUR is back to a regular full-field event this week as the FedExCup Fall fires up with three tournaments in the next four weeks. This week’s event is the Sanderson Farms Championship, which tees off Thursday, October 2, and continues through Sunday, October 5. The Sanderson Farms Championship will take place at The Country Club of Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi. Let’s take a brief look at the history of this event and the course that will host this week’s tournament.
The History of the Sanderson Farms Championship
The tournament in Mississippi has been part of the PGA TOUR schedule since 1968, when it began as the Magnolia Classic. It moved to its current location in 2014. The event used to be one of the earliest events on the wraparound schedule as part of the following year, but since the PGA changed that format a few years ago, it’s part of the re-imagined FedExCup Fall.
This is the second of the six events in the FedExCup Fall, which gives players the opportunity to improve their status for next season. The top 100 at the end of the FedExCup Fall will be fully exempt for next year’s Full-Field Events and a spot in THE PLAYERS. Players finishing No. 101 through No. 125 on the final FedExCup Fall standings will have conditional status for the 2026 PGA TOUR Season.
While the event has been held opposite the Ryder Cup and WGC events in the past, it has been a standalone event for the last several years.
The tournament has gone to a playoff in each of the last three years, with Mackenzie Hughes, Luke List, and Kevin Yu all triumphing in extra holes. Yu beat Beau Hossler last year for his first PGA TOUR win, after Keith Mitchell had a 35-foot birdie try to win, but it slid past – and he missed the four-foot comebacker to miss the playoff.
Mitchell, Hossler, and Yu are all back this year along with Akshay Bhatia, who is the highest-ranked golfer in the field at No. 34 and is one of five golfers who finished in the top 50 in the FedExCup standings but are still playing this week. Min Woo Lee, J.T. Poston, and Sam Stevens are the other golfers in the top 50 in the world who are playing in Mississippi.
Like Yu last year, seven of the 11 most recent winners at this event have been first-time winners on the PGA Tour, making it a great place for a breakthrough victory.
The purse for the Sanderson Farms Championship is a total of $6 million, with the winner claiming $1.08 million. The winner also gets the famous rooster trophy in the photo at the top of this post. The Rooster, whose name is Reveille, is a nod to Sanderson Farms’ chicken business, and it has become a signature mark of the event.
A Closer Look at the Course
The Country Club of Jackson will be hosting this event for the 12th straight season. It is a long but straightforward parkland course known for low scores. It rewards players who get hot with their putter on the fast Bermuda greens.
The course dates back to 1914, but the most recent renovation by John Fought in 2008 set up the current layout and tracking. While it has no official connection to Donald Ross, it plays very similarly to Ross tracks since Fought was inspired by numerous Ross layouts.
Here’s a virtual flyover of the course to refresh your memory of what the pros will be dealing with this week.
From a statistical standpoint, Strokes Gained: Approach is the key to setting up plenty of scoring chances. Birdie or Better% and Strokes Gained: Putting on Bermuda are critical to success as well, since whoever wins will have to go very low and take advantage of the Par 5 scoring opportunities, especially.
It should be a fun way to get back into stroke play tournaments after the Ryder Cup drama, and the field this year is stronger than usual in Jackson. DraftKings has some great contests on the board, headlined by the PGA TOUR $250K Sand Trap [$50K to 1st], which offers a $50,000 top prize for a $25 entry.
