Friday Fallout

It's Friday and our theme is fallout, so deal with it...

Duck Fallout - Let me first just reiterate how great it all was, beginning with the ladies the prior week.  Conclusion Numero Uno is that team match play rocks.  

Obviously there was much discussion about the unfortunate injury to Beau Hossler, including this from lee Ringler about changing the rules to allow for a substitution:

For any change to be effective, substitution would have to be allowed for any reason, be

 it injury or poor performance. Leave it to the coach’s discretion, just as in other team sports.

With a national championship at stake, Hossler’s pivotal injury provided a textbook example of why substitutions in college golf make more sense than ever.

We can all agree that it was most unfortunate and that we'd have preferred that Texas could make such a substitute, and yet it's not the slam dunk you'd think it is.  Shack explains why on the tube and in print:

In a sport already teetering on the brink of serious have vs. have not, carrying another player to the national finals and incorporating a sixth player during the season would add another cost factor that college golf can't ignore. Ringler points out the topic is a regular topic at the coaches convention. 

As I explained to Cara Robinson on Morning Drive, the resources were there at this year's final. But more often than not, injuries rarely happen and adding another cost wouldn't do college golf any good. Also note the highlights played as I'm talking, Brandt Packer and team really captured that final putt in style.

In this day of men's sports being cut back to ensure compliance with Title IX, increasing the cost structure of college golf (and one assumes the big programs would include the substitute with their normal travel squads) will only serve to decrease playing opportunities.

But our game has only the most tenuous relationship to fairness, what Tom Doak amusingly calls the "F" word.  

Shack has other worthy links in his post, including to this Beth Ann Nichols profile of Taylor Funk.  What I found most interesting was that the announcers seemed to go out of their way to not inform us that he's Fred's kid... Wassup with that?  But back to Shack with the numbers:

The overnights are in and SportsTVRatings says the three hour, forty minute telecast in east coast primetime averaged 325,000 viewers, with 94,000 from the only demo that matters. I'm not sure where that number lands, but that's definitely double any PGA Tour fall event and has to be one of the channel's higher rated non-PGA Tour live telecasts. Hopefully that helps Golf Channel's investment pay off with the combination of eyeballs and buzz.

That's pretty good for our little game that struggles to match the ratings of The Real Hosewives of Ponte Vedra Beach...  but the key word above is likely prime time (I know, make that key words).  Obviously this event needs to be moved around the country and it's preferable to play in daylight, but on a Monday-Wednesday it needs to be televised at night.  Discuss among yourselves...

Trump Fallout - Don'y worry, I mean that in a minimalist sense....  Just as relates to the event formerly held at Doral.  You know, for more than sixty years....

Shack had a daytime post on Wednesday that I almost missed in my unrestrained lust over the presser for the ages....Here's the gist of Geoff's thoughts:

President Trump's first day in office just got one more item added to his list of things to abolish! 

It's called, the PGA Tour's 501c3 tax status! 

I can't fathom how the PGA Tour would chose today, the Wednesday of The Memorial, as the day to dump news they are leaving Trump Doral for a yet-unnamed course in Mexico City. That's the city they haven't been to since..oh that's right, Senior Tour players were robbed having dinner!

Even more audacious, Commissioner Tim Finchem is holding a press conference atMuirfield Village at 3 pm ET. 

Take that, Jack, you Trump supporter! 

There have been so many signs that the Commissioner has exceeded his sell-by date, but I can't fathom a better example than not having found a solution to this matter. How about eating the sponsorship of the Doral WGC stop for a year to avoid a showdown with Donald Trump? It would also have meant avoiding a showdown on the eve of a Memorial with its best field in years, and on the day the greatest golfer ever, Jack Nicklaus, is honoring his pal Johnny Miller. The entire fiasco seems downright rude and short-sighted on an unfathomable level even for the Napoleonic Commish.

First, let's tip our caps the Shack for tying the move to Jack's support of Trump... It's probably more amusing than true, but we also probably like amusement more than truth.  

You know I've been critical of the Tour for spitting on its own history time and again, even though Doral itself leaves me cold.  Geoff avoids the entire issue of the creation of the WGC's, which was all about the Commish controlling the golf calendar and has little to do with the "W" in the acronym....

I'm agnostic about whether Timmy should have self-sponsored the event, as I just don't have enough information.  But the man doesn't bring an abiding love of the game to the office, and his legacy will be limited to the amount by which he increased purses and playing opportunities.  If you live and die by your deal-making, it seems entirely fair to note your failure to handle this one....

Equally importantly, his abject failure to control the media environment is downright comical....  Trump played him for the fool, again in a field that's supposed to be in little Timmy's wheelhouse.... Obviously Jack shouldn't have to pay the price for the Commish's fumbling, but it's also the sponsors...

But it reminds of something that normal human beings would have long forgotten, Tiger's infamous press conference at TPC Sawgrass after he decapitated that defenseless fire hydrant.  I know, my mind works in strange ways, when it bothers to work at all....

Anyone remember when that awkward event took place?  Anyone?  Bueller?

It was on the Wednesday of the that year's Match Play event, which just happens to start on a Wednesday.  Our hero made his Ponte Vedra fortress available to Tiger while there were golfers on the course in Arizona.... How do we think Accenture felt about that?  And might that partially explain why Accenture is no longer a partner of the Tour?

That's why I would never be Tim Finchem's partner in anything...  There's a serious of principals and sponsors that he's treated miserably over the years, and he thinks nothing of directly competing with them after the ink is dry (think of the FedEx Cup nonsense).  I'd be interested in knowing whether Jack and Nationwide even receive an insincere apology from the Tour, but my guess would be not.  I don't think that Finchem is out to deliberately hurt Nationwide or Accenture, I just don't think he cares much one way or the other.

Political Fallout - As a smooth segue from the previous item, Golf Digest has presented us with a new feature to which one can only ask, "You sure you want to go there"?

On the right (sort of) we have the legendary Dan Jenkins, and firmly on the left is John Feinstein in a new Golf Digest Political Blog.  It's an odd strategy, as most media organizations choose to pis soff half the country, but GD is clearly shooting for the twofer.  There's no doubt who gets the better of the opening arguments, as he's both the better writer and on the side of the angels:

I’m also amused by the people who call Trump a “loose cannon,” suggesting he might 

Shouldn't they have, you know, flipped this image?

drag us into “nuke-lar combat toe to toe with the Rooskies,” as Slim Pickens says in "Dr. Strangelove." 

Trust me on this, people. A guy with a wife who looks like Melania ain’t gonna blow up the world. 

As for Trump’s opponent, our “lyin’, crooked” modern-day Bonnie Parker, who’s been in public life for 25 years but has said only one thing anybody remembers--“What difference does it make?"--I can only paraphrase the words of Mark Twain from a 100 years ago: 

“When you see a political leader you think is excellent, keep in mind that she only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.”

She?  Whomever could he mean?  Now Feinstein has some moments, such as this:

Then there’s the notion that Bob Knight has become a political genius. I know Bob Knight, I worked with Bob Knight, and believe me, he’s no John Kennedy. Why is Trump so attractive to Knight? Because they’re the SAME PERSON.

I'm for anything that gives Dan Jenkins a reason to amuse, even if it's in support of Donald Trump.

Hockey Stick Fallout - Any of you know the name Michael Mann?  He's a climatista from Penn State who in the late nineties produced the famous hockey stick graph that purported to show a straight-line dramatic increase in global temperatures over the ages.... Just one little detail emerged to undermine the too-good-to-fact-check visual, if you picked a different start date the graph didn't work as well.  So while we can agree that science doesn't lie, unfortunately scientists will and do....

Don't you learn interesting things here at Unplayable Lies?  Can this possible have relevance to little game, I hear you snarking.... Alas, yes, as the USGA has published a report that tells us not to believe our lyin' eyes:

Between 2003 and the end of the 2015 season, average driving distance on four of the seven tours increased about 1%, or 0.2 yards per year. For the same period, average driving distance on the other three of those seven tours decreased about 1%

I certainly feel better that they're on the case.... But as Luke Kerr-Dineen (who is now at USA Today) informs, that 2003 date is highly relevant:

Yes, there may have been a massive increase in driving distance between 1993 and 2003 that the USGA didn’t include in its key findings, but there’s a very good reason for that: Golf technology was exploding during that era, and things only began to level off in 2003, when companies began hitting the USGA’s legal limit.

It really seems to come down to an issue of whether you're happy with the current state of play.... as per Luke:

The counter argument made by the pro-rollback technology crowd is that the damage has already been done. Even if we take as true the notion that the current rate of distance growth is acceptable, it’s already reached too high a point. It doesn’t matter that your ship is sinking slower than it was before. It’s still sinking. 

Historically great courses that are part of golf’s heritage, St. Andrews being the best example, have already been badly compromised. The land and costs that go along with maintaining them have already reached the point of instability. Maintaining the ceiling where it is now won’t bring these courses back into relevance. To do that, you need to lower the ceiling and keep it there.

Shack goes after this issue in comparing driving distance and accuracy, and interestingly goes back as far as 2000 to prove his point.  Though he elides a key point I think.... we tend to focus on the distance that ProV1's and their like travel, but I've long believed that the reduced spin is also a major factor.  he makes this point in the midst of his rant (which you should read in its entirety if the subject is of interest):

In 2003, that number increased to nine and it has kept climbing. Better athletes who have grown up not knowing what a persimmon miss looks like and who have optimized launch conditions are able to drive it significantly longer than their predecessors.

Those persimmon misses were ugly, partially due to the size and composition of the clubhead, but also because the balls spun so much more.  One reason the Bubbas of the world can air it out is that their misses don't go as wide...

Shack as an addendum from this gent with some telling data as well as this useful perspective:

Kris McEwan at Golficity breaks down the numbers and says the year-by-year analysis is "the equivalent of measuring the growth of a child and only reporting the year to year change. In turn, you are ignoring how much taller the child is actually getting across the overall span of time. Suddenly, you look at your kid twenty years later and he’s six feet tall and you’re asking yourself, 'when did that happen?!'"

The challenge is that the technology has made the game far more enjoyable for the masses, but has had a different effect on the game played at the highest levels.  That seems to this observer to be an argument for bifurcation, but....

To be continued at a later date, in perpetuity.

Beard Fallout - I had jokingly suggested a Beef-Boo-Beard pairing in the U.S. Open, but there's a second reason that might not happen (the first being Boo taking razor in hand):

I'm not saying it's the yips, but it's the yips.

I'm also not saying it's the beard....but...

Cheap Shots -

Dog Bites Man - VIDEO: Phil Mickelson plunks marshal in head with wayward tee shot

And I'm The Queen of Sheba - Finchem: Tour Leaving Doral Not About Trump

Not In The Biblical Sence One Hopes - Natalie Gulbis: The Donald Trump I Know