Weird Is As Weird Does

No doubt you saw the Tour's update on next year's FedEx Cup format, including one wrinkle that was new from the trial balloon of a month or so ago.  I expect I'll go a bit long here, so we'll put this up in its own post.

Here's the bit that was known:

In line with the reports leading up to Tuesday, rather than a points reset at the season finale, the tour will implement a descending strokes-based system calibrated off the

playoff standings. Meaning, the player with the most amount of points after the BMW Championship will start the Tour Championship at 10 under par. The following four in rankings will begin at eight under through five under; the next five start at four under, regressing by one stroke for every five players. Those ranked No 26 through 30 will tee off at even par. 

This configuration ensures that the player with the lowest total score at East Lake will be the FedEx Cup champion. (Unlike last year, where Xander Schauffele won the Tour Championship but Justin Thomas captured the FedEx Cup.) Despite this staggered scoring, the Tour Championship will still count as an official victory.

It fails to sound any less crazy on the second go around, but let's let Jay explain it all to us:

“This is a significant and exciting change for the PGA Tour, our players, our partners and—most importantly—our fans,” Monahan said. “As soon as the Tour Championship begins, any fan—no matter if they’ve followed the PGA Tour all season or are just tuning in for the final event—can immediately understand what’s going on and what’s at stake for every single player in the field. And, of course, players will know exactly where they stand at all times while in play, which will ratchet up the drama, consequence and volatility of the competition down the stretch."

Easy there, cowboy, as that's pretty much the same thing we were promised the last three times the format was tweaked.  My first instinct is to note the rigidity of the system, that staggering of the field is arbitrarily determined...  But perhaps the bigger issue is the search fro a comparable, an athletic competition where starting positions are staggered based upon prior results?  Anyone?  Bueller?

Ryan Lavner certainly agrees:

In an age of points and projections, the Tour’s desire for simplicity is understandable – RIP, Steve Sands’ whiteboard – but its new-look finale violates the spirit of competitive sports. 

There are no head starts in sports. That’s the beauty of them.

Tom Brady and the New England Patriots don’t open the Super Bowl with a 7-0 lead.

Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors don’t start the best-of-7 NBA Finals with a one-game advantage. 

Lindsey Vonn doesn’t begin the Olympics with a three-second lead. 

Roger Federer doesn’t automatically take a 1-0 lead on his Wimbledon opponent.

But the PGA Tour has essentially created a handicapped tournament for its grand finale, for the 30 best players of the season. 

What a missed opportunity.

And that guy with the guaranteed two-shot lead will get an official Tour W if he prevails, despite the head start and the need to beat only 29 others....  A minor point, but grating nonetheless.

We'll circle, back, but first the new bit:

Also of note is a new season-long race—the Wyndham Rewards Top 10—that ends at the 

conclusion of the regular season. The top-10 finishers in the FedEx Cup at the Wyndham Championship will see their bank accounts padded, with the leader earning $2 million, runner-up $1.5 million and 10th-place finisher getting $500,000. 

“We are excited to unveil the Wyndham Rewards Top 10 next year, which will place an even greater premium on excelling over the course of the regular season,” said Andy Pazder, chief tournament and competitions officer for the PGA Tour. “Season-long success is tantamount to qualifying for and advancing through the FedEx Cup Playoffs, and this is an exciting way to reward the best of the best and provide an added layer of drama for our fans in each market and around the world.”

And we all thought we had seen the last of Steve Sands' whiteboard?   

I believe the Tour has created the hot mess that is the FedEx Cup by trying to simultaneously serve two masters.  They have wanted both a worthy season-long winner, while at the same time keeping the "drama" alive until the back nine at East Lake.  Those two objectives are pretty much irreconcilable, and the result is the inane logarithms that have made the event borderline unwatchable.

In theory, the creation of this separate reward for season-long excellence should be a positive, and allow for what comes after to amuse.  But the suits in Ponte Vedra Beach seem quite determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory....

Here's Shack's take on the Wyndham bit:

—Wyndham has to bribe players with a bonus pool to show up at the final “regular season” event now that the top seeds at the FedExCup get a lovely reward for their season-long efforts.

It;s even drearier than that, I fear.  You've got the FedEx in Memphis the week before the Wyndham, so you're pretty much locking the guys into five straight weeks of highly lucrative yet ultimately meaningless golf.  

Lavner proceeds to describe that missed opportunity, a solution that conforms closely to that which I've been advocating since the inception of this stillborn event:

Then start the playoffs – a real playoff – where everyone starts at zero and where past performance guarantees nothing but a spot in the elimination tournament. 

Only those who make the cut in the 100- or 125-man Northern Trust advance to the 70-player BMW Championship. If Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy or Jordan Spieth play poorly and miss out, well, tough luck. Play better. Survive and advance. 

At the BMW Championship, it’ll be a fight to finish inside the top 30 on the leaderboard, and it’s easy to imagine a 5-for-2 playoff at the conclusion of play for those attempting to crack the Tour Championship field. 

Once the top 30 is finalized, there’s no need for a staggered stroke start. 

Play a three-round stroke-play qualifier (Wednesday-Friday), then cut to the low 16 players and have a knockout match-play bracket over the weekend for $15 million.

Like a good lawyer, Ryan cites the negatives as well, if only to swat them away:

Sure, some of the stars will have been cut in the previous two playoff events. 

Others will fail to make the top 16 at East Lake. 

But even if the final is whittled down to Kyle Stanley vs. Patton Kizzire, how cool would it be to watch two players go head to head for the richest prize in all of sports? 

At least they’d have earned their spot in the championship. 

At least there were no bizarre head starts. 

At least the event would have stayed true to what it really is – a well-run tournament at the end of a long season that is a glorified cash grab. 

The Tour wanted to create a unique end to the season, but that shouldn’t mean turning its big-money finale into a net tournament.

There are alternatives here, but on the concept I'm in complete agreement.  Make it a high-stakes shootout for the $15 million large, and you'll get your eyeballs.

I think the match-play will be an especially hard sell, because it leaves the Tour and NBC with an almost guaranteed letdown on that final Sunday, either because of the players involved or because of a noncompetitive match.  I think the better choice is to weed the field down to a handful of players on that final day, and let them play that 18 holes for an amount that, as someone said recently, takes them out of their comfort zone.

I also think you could seed players based upon season-long performance to increase their chances of surviving the suicide pools.  This is a tricky concept for sure, as that likely means that those players might not tee it up at one or both of the playoff events.  This concept needs work, but it would placate the networks to have their show ponies guaranteed for a certain portion of the programming.

Ultimately, the problem they've created is that the concept of playoffs is an awkward fit in golf, because chalk is meaningless in the short term.  The best players in the world win so infrequently, compared to the major team sports or even tennis, that any form of elimination event will be ultimately prove unsatisfying. 

But remove any social significance from it and allow us to embrace it for what it is, a crazy money grab that rewards the lucky guy that gets hot at the right time.  Which is what it's mostly been anyway, with winner such as Bill Haas, Billy Horschel and the like.  The more chaotic, the better, and that 5-for-2 playoff to get into the Sunday shoot-out could be the most fun of all.

Reactions?

We'll exit with this pitch perfect quote from last year's winner, summing up the nonsense and inspiring my headers:

"It's something that is very, very weird and going to be hard to get used to,'' Thomas said. "We talked about it, and it's ... never going to be perfect.'' 

Thomas, the reigning FedEx Cup champ, is part of the tour's players advisory committee. It means he has a voice in how business is conducted. And yet he doesn't seem sold.

None of us are....  It's the tweak to end all tweaks, and I suspect it will work about as well as that war to end all wars did.