It's hard to look anywhere on The Northern Trust tee sheet and find anything other than a top-shelf pairing. Golfers are grouped in order of their FedEx Cup ranking for this first playoff event, which means we have several loaded up trios.

The most obvious place to start is always with Tiger Woods. He's ranked No. 28 in the FedEx Cup standings and grouped with Scott Piercy and J.T. Poston (last week's Wyndham Championship winner) for Round 1.

The first three in the standings -- Brooks Koepka, Rory McIlroy and Matt Kuchar -- will play together. So will Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm and Webb Simpson. 

You also get fun trios of Justin Thomas, Bryson DeChambeau and Tommy Fleetwood, and Justin Rose, Marc Leishman and Rickie Fowler. All in all, the way this plays out is more organic (and probably more fun) than normal as the first event of the three-tournament playoff run gets underway at Liberty National on Thursday.