Fix it already
Playoffs? Don’t talk about playoffs. You kidding me? Playoffs?!
Jim Mora was talking about his Indianapolis Colts when the coach went on his famous post-loss rant in 2001. His words above would apply perfectly these days with golf.
FedEx Cup playoffs? You kidding me? Playoffs?
The PGA Tour’s postseason began last week with the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the first of what the tour likes to call “playoff” events. But it’s not and never has been a real playoff. If it was, Rory McIlroy would have been eliminated for not even showing up in Memphis. Instead, he could skip this week’s BMW Championship at Caves Valley as well and still advance to the finale, the Tour Championship at East Lake, and win it all.
That’s not a playoff. That’s a series rigged to protect the stars with no consequences. The current system is all carrot (huge bonuses) and no stick (the leaders are guaranteed access to the championship).
Nobody is expecting anything as thrilling as the Stanley Cup chase, as passionate as the NCAA Basketball Tournament or as big as the Super Bowl, but golf can certainly do better than it’s doing now.
Golf has long struggled with how best to handle playoffs. The U.S. Open once had a 36-hole playoff in the event of a tie before downsizing to 18 holes. Now every major has its own tiebreaking system, with the Masters strictly sudden death while the U.S. Open (two-hole aggregate), PGA Championship (three holes) and Open Championship (four holes) insist on doing their own thing. It’s complicated but it gets the job done.
The PGA Tour, however, has been wrestling with the concept of a postseason “playoff” ever since it introduced the FedEx Cup in 2007. It shed a tournament, handed out multiple trophies, eliminated white-board mathematics, issued and retracted handicapped starting strokes and finally just yielded to letting the last 30 men standing play straight up at East Lake to determine a “champion.”
None of it has ever really connected with the public the way playoffs do in every other sport. Nobody is expecting anything as thrilling as the Stanley Cup chase, as passionate as the NCAA Basketball Tournament or as big as the Super Bowl, but golf can certainly do better than it’s doing now.
To be real “playoffs” there need to be real consequences. The word playoff is a mash-up that means if you don’t “play” well you’re sent “off.” It’s essentially that simple.
That’s what the PGA Tour needs to embrace. The whole season coddles and protects the marquee stars. The tour needs to stop doing that with the postseason. It needs to create real stakes to grab the attention of both players and fans in a month when baseball season lags and football season looms.
The fix is as simple as A-B-C-D to make it a true playoff:
Turn the Wyndham Championship into the wild-card round. The top 30 in season-long points to that stage get a bye as well as the next season’s Masters qualifying perk. The next 120 players compete in Greensboro and only the top 40 finishers advance to join the other 30 in the next round.
No more skipping. All 70 players tee it up at the FedEx St. Jude Championship and only the top 50 move on. If Scottie Scheffler or McIlroy have a bad week or get hurt, that’s just the rub of the green. Play on.
The 50 survivors play the BMW Championship and only the top 30 finishers advance to East Lake. As in each previous playoff event, tiebreakers for those last spots are handled in sudden death.
The Tour Championship at East Lake is a 30-man free-for-all with the winner crowned as the true playoff “champion.” No superstar crybabies if you didn’t make it while the Cinderella who lifts the trophy and cashes the big check was ranked 150th before the playoffs started.
Who wouldn’t enjoy that kind of weekly elimination drama to cap off the golf season? The stakes every week would be huge with guys desperately trying to survive and advance. There might even be multiple playoffs on Sunday each week with one to determine the tournament winner and another to qualify for the next week.
Now that the PGA Tour has a CEO who hails from the NFL – a league that knows how to deliver postseason drama – there’s hope that Brian Rolapp can do what’s needed to inject life into the FedEx Cup playoffs and make it an actual playoff.
Because golf needs it to give fans something to care about when the major season is over.
Scott Michaux
E-MAIL SCOTT
Top: Jim Mora
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