When an underwhelming product is extensively modified (say, for example, Greg Norman’s Irish golf course, Doonbeg) or even entirely discarded (like, say, Greg Norman’s Stonehaven design in Scottsdale or Greg Norman’s Great White course in Florida or Greg Norman’s Experience at Koele in Hawaii), the ultimate goal is something better.
But can that be said of the FedEx Cup playoffs system, which has been tweaked so frequently since its 2007 inception? It depends on what you believe the intent of the FedEx Cup is, and what you believe may not be aligned with what the mandarins at PGA Tour headquarters think.
Every change to the playoffs formula — how many guys can qualify, the number of events, how points are accumulated and weighted, the staggered scoring — all share one objective: to tether the postseason more snugly to the results of the regular season. In effect, to serve a function antithetical to that of playoffs in other major sports. The result of such manipulation is that golf’s playoffs are not actually playoffs. Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter said that good teams make the playoffs but hot teams win them. Regular season heroics guarantee zilch in the postseason, beyond perhaps a home-field advantage, but nothing material to a contest. The PGA Tour, however, wants the marketing punch of promoting playoffs — which conjure a win-or-die suspense — without actually subjecting its players to a win-or-die system.
Playoffs are about volatility and shock upsets. Ask the ’08 Patriots or the ’23 Bruins. By comparison, the paternalistic PGA Tour has spent almost two decades trying to offset those essential elements and attempting to engineer outcomes that mirror the results of the regular season. Points accumulated through the Wyndham Championship, the last stop before the playoffs, are carried all the way through to the grand finale at the Tour Championship and used to determine how many strokes under par a player will begin (Scottie Scheffler, No. 1 in points, will begin next week’s tournament 10-under-par). The Tour wants its FedEx Cup champion to be someone who performed consistently well all year, not someone who got hot for a couple weeks in August, so rolling regular season points into the playoffs helps stack the deck toward that outcome.
Hideki Matsuyama raises the FedEx Cup TPC Championship trophy to the crowd during the final round of the FedEx St. Jude Championship golf tournament at TPC Southwind. Mandatory Credit: Steve Roberts-USA TODAY Sports
Quibbles about the FedEx Cup are a matter of nomenclature. If it’s a season-long race (as the Tour admits), then stop promoting it as playoffs. If the aspiration is actual playoffs, then whatever happened before the first shot of the post-season shouldn’t matter. But there is a way to bridge this divide and produce genuinely exciting playoffs in golf. I offer it here to Commissioner Monahan at no cost beyond the usual retainer he sends, according to LIV’s conspiratorial gobshites.
The FedEx St. Jude Championship should remain as it is and where it is. Sure, Memphis in August makes Tour pros sweat more than seeing their wives scrolling through their text messages, but it’s where FedEx is headquartered and a little swamp ass is a small price to pay when the company is delivering such a huge sponsorship. Keep it as 70 players starting and only 50 moving on to the BMW Championship. Heck, as a sop to the importance of the regular season, let points continue to determine who those 50 guys are.
But end the utility of points there and truly shake things up.
Instead of 30 guys continuing on to the Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta, just 16 make it, and a head-to-head match-play bracket determines the $25 million first prize. The top four in points after the FedEx St. Jude Championship are exempt directly into the seeded bracket at East Lake, though still required to play all three postseason events. That’s their entire earned advantage for an outstanding regular season. To grant anything more amounts to placing thumbs on the scale. In any event, pre-playoffs results are already generously rewarded. Scheffler just took home $8 million from the Comcast Business Tour Top 10 for that very thing.
The 12 men needed to fill out the bracket for the match-play showdown would be determined not by a weighted and dated points formula but by the BMW Championship leaderboard, and if multi-man sudden death is needed to settle the last place, all the better. And since the BMW is the most mobile of the playoff events — it hasn’t been held at the same venue in consecutive years since 2011 — it ought to be moved out west, forcing broadcasters to air it in prime time in the east. Build audience interest in what’s at stake, and in what comes the following week.
Trauma from the WGC-Match Play era lingers at Tour HQ for good reason, having seen more than a handful of finals featuring worthy but thoroughly unengaging competitors. The prospects of that happening are reduced in a 16-man field versus 64, but if they’re playing for $25 million then the FedEx Cup itself takes center stage, regardless of star power. And most of us would watch a chop from the local muni play if 25 large is on the line. Match play would also eliminate the online mockery about gross and net divisions in the Tour Championship, which has plagued the event since the staggered starting scores were introduced in 2019.
There’s a way to value season-long accomplishments while guaranteeing the capriciousness and surprises that sports fans expect from their playoffs. It just requires the stomach for one more round of changes to the system.
There you go, Commish. You’re welcome. Just send the check to the usual offshore account.
