Our Long National Nightmare Ends: World Ranking Points Will Be Awarded At The Tour Championship

While we await the bizarre new format to decide the FedExCup and then await its replacement, your prayers and thoughts have helped deliver precious official world ranking points to the field after a policy board approval.

I’m not sure anything is less interesting to the golf fan than world ranking points, but to the players it can be the difference between a nice guarantee at the season’s start, a place in majors or endorsement bonuses.

From Doug Ferguson’s AP story explaining how the new system would have worked last year—Tiger fans, cover your eyes :

Under the new system, Woods would have started at 2 under as the 20th seed, and thus finished at 13 under. Instead of winning and getting 62 ranking points, he would have finished second. Rose was at 6 under, but he would have started at 8 under as the No. 2 seed and finished at 14 under.

The world ranking could not have given Rose points for “winning” when his real score had him tied for fourth.

The Tour Championship has such a strong field that not awarding ranking points could have cost players endorsement money, because most contracts have an incentive tied to the world ranking. It’s even more critical now because of how tight it is at the top.

I’m pretty sure fans would be more intrigued by the endorsement contract ramifications than the FedExCup leaderboard.

Rossi, if Justin makes birdie here, he’ll finish T14, putting him over the edge for that $125,000 Bonobos bonus for finishing the season world No. 1. What’s he got?