PGA Tour's FedEx Cup Fix Looks To Make BCS, Chase Look Positively Brilliant
/Rex Hoggard reports that the PGA Tour has come up with its FedEx Cup fix and as you might imagine, it's pitiful on a level that even a conoisseur of unimaginative Tour initiatives finds astonishing.
Most agreed the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup needed fixing after the second edition of the circuit’s playoffs produced another anticlimactic finish and a Tour Championship without the likes of Padraig Harrington. At the Children’s Miracle Network Classic, players got a glimpse at the Tour’s possible solution.
Well, actually many said it needed fixing after year one and a few others noted that it was broken before the even started. Nonetheless, there is some good news. The playoffs will start at the top 125 instead of the top 144, which only about 400 writers suggested never made sense. Hoggard says points will be "recalibrated" just like in previous years.
Now remember the Harrington reference by Hoggard. It's driving this madness.
The top 90 after the playoff opener would advance to the Deutsche Bank Championship, down from 120, followed by the top 60, down from 70, earning spots at the BMW Championship.
The top 30 points earners will advance to the Tour Championship, and the points will be reset to assure that all 30 players have a mathematical chance to win the season-long race.“It’s a nice medium between what we had in 2007 and 2008,” said Zach Johnson, one of four player directors on the Policy Board.
Oh yes, it's medium.
So you read that right. They are proposing not one, but two points resets! You know, because fans have been clamoring for even more number-crunching and countless explanations from Dan Hicks. Oh and more graphics too!
While the plan seems to be a work in progress, many PAC members didn’t expect much to change before the final version is submitted to the Policy Board.
“It seems like (the Tour) always comes to us with ‘X’ and we talk about it and suggest ‘Y,’ but they never really consider ‘Y,’” said one longtime PAC member who requested he not be identified.
A head-to-head, winner-take-all shootout, possibly a match-play event between the top players after the Tour Championship, had been suggested but was not part of the Tour’s proposal.
“That really doesn’t work, because TV and the sponsors don’t want to see Brett Quigley playing Omar Uresti for the championship,’’ Quigley said. “You just never know with match play. They want the top players.”
First of all, the winner-take-all concepts as proposed by yours truly, or the more recent idea picking up steam, never called for match play. Instead, it has been suggested ad nauseum that a final day with 4 or 8 players teeing it up with $10 million on the line might attract just a bit of attention. So if the final day group is determined by the final FedEx Cup points tally, the chances of a Quigley-Uresti showdown is pretty slim, but let's say that happens and there is $10 million on the line. Who cares? They are playing for $10 million!
Yet here we are in year three and the PGA Tour brass is tacking on more complicated points permuations and getting even further away from a true playoff. Can someone please tell me how all of these free-marketeering, independent contracting, survival-of-the-fittest Darwinists, macho lovers of democratic competition, can be so terrified of a true playoff?
I know, I know, so we can get the stars like Harrington to East Lake, even if he misses two cuts. Brilliant.
