Thursday Themes - Pick Six Edition

So, your humble blogger finally got one right....

Here's Geoff on the non-pick:

Turns out, Keegan Bradley never planned to pick Keegan Bradley.

The 2025 Ryder Cup captain said the “decision was made a while ago that I wouldn’t be playing” this year’s matches at Bethpage. Now he tells us!

Bradley did admit to pondering a change of heart—probably back when it was looking like the USA team was around five deep—before reverting to his plan of only leading the squad. Bradley finished 11th in the points race.

“I would say there was a point this year where I was playing, a while ago,” Bradley said. “All these guys stepped up in a major way and played their way onto this team. That's something that I'm really proud of and something that I really wanted.”

That Bradley kept a poker face throughout the last few months and kept the Cupnescenti speculating bodes well. The Captaincy comes down to some combination of organization, motivational speaking, communication, narcissism management, and making three tough calls: on pick day and again before the Friday and Saturday weekday sessions.

“I was confident that if I did need to play, I had incredible vice captains that I could lean on, an incredible team I could lean on,” he said. “But I've said through this process over and over and over, I was going to do what I thought was best for the team, and this was the decision that I thought was best.”

To me, the only outstanding question is how long Keegs has been reading along with us here, because he channeled my thoughts perfectly.  What's not said explicitly but I believe is inferred is that Keegan would have needed to separate himself from the other players, an automatic qualification being the most obvious manner of doin so.  But given that the last grouping of players from whence the final pick or two would come, Bradley, Burns, Young and McNeally, were bunched, it made little sense to risk the vagaries of a dual role.

More from Geoff:

Bradley said he advised rookies like Maverick McNealy to make the team on points since Captain’s picks were unlikely to go to first-timers. McNealy finished 10th in points, one spot

behind Ben Griffin and four clear of Cameron Young, who each will make their Ryder Cup debuts. Griffin was rewarded for his consistency and Young for a late burst of play that included his first PGA Tour win. He also has the best history with Bethpage Black of anyone in the matches.

By Wednesday’s gathering at PGA of America headquarters in Frisco, Collin Morikawa was rumored to be the odd-man out after deep data crunching. Bradley put that idea to rest by making him the second name announced.

“Collin is one of the most genuine, thoughtful people that I've ever met,” Bradley said. “He's an incredible teammate, incredible ball striker. His golf resume speaks for itself. But more importantly, he'll do whatever it takes to help our team win, and he brings so much to our team. Really proud to have him.”

Sure, or at least Collin is a perfect teammate for that Cantlay guy, as collectively the two of them owe nobody anything....

Sean Zak has quite the curious take:

Ryder Cup fans just lost something special. Now, we may never get it

 The build-up, though, seems a little forced:

Was it ever really on the table?

Was it even feasible?

How close was it?

The questions Keegan Bradley faced immediately after not choosing himself as a Ryder Cup

captain’s pick were, well, the exact same questions we were all asking at home, or in group chats or in DMs in our work Slack channels. When it comes to the Ryder Cup, more than any other event in golf, the journalists in the room can be a lot like those watching on the couch — we all love a good story. And this one, as the kids like to say, would have done numbies.

Ratings would have been higher. The secondary market for tickets — already massively inflated — would have found new heights. There would be more Ryder Cup on your Instagram feed and in your email inbox and around the water cooler.

And now? It will still be a fantastic, epic, rollicking time. But it won’t quite be what many of use were dreaming about. Golf fans lost something in those captain’s picks Wednesday morning, and we’ll probably never know exactly what it was.

I think Sean should give his italics key the rest of the day off....

Ratings apparently are going to tank because Keegs didn't call his own number, and who would tune in for Scottie v. Rory?

“We weren’t scrambling at all,” he added.

Well, pal, the rest of us were! And for good reason. Because for as chaotically extra as the Ryder Cup is on its own, and as gloriously capitalistic as it has become for the PGA of America, the one thing that draws eyeballs to the event is golf in its rawest form. Nerves you cannot replicate, even in the final group of a major. Angst that simply doesn’t exist in stroke play. Strains of disdain, if only temporary, that don’t arise in this game of gentlemen.

More human nature oozes out of the trappings of a Ryder Cup than anywhere else in the game. That’s why I believed for months that it was a lock — Bradley would call his own number. Because the nature of an elite professional golfer is to believe in your ability to hit the shot, regardless of the lie. It’s an obligation of mindset atop the game — you can do anything with a club in your hands. It contradicts Bradley’s DNA, during the best golfing year of his life, to hand the baton to someone else, but here we are. The world of optimized lineups, defensive shifts and, in this sport, setting up golf courses to play to fractions of an advantage, took over years ago. In the process we sacrificed an element of freewheeling in pursuit of overthinking.

One thing you wouldn’t have to think long about: Would Seve Ballesteros have selected himself?

Undoubtedly. Phil Mickelson would have, too. They would have drooled at the prospect of being a true puppet-master.

So, Keegs should have chosen himself because Phil would have done it?  Sean, have you been in a cone of silence the last few years?  Because Phil has an odor to him in recent times....

But see if this bit holds up to reality any better than the above:

Tiger Woods grabbed the opportunity at the 2019 Presidents Cup, and then he went down to Australia and handed out daily lessons to golfers half his age — as well as those of us watching back home past midnight. What Woods did that week remains one of the most underappreciated aspects of his legend, mostly because it took place in the wee hours in the United States. Were it to have unfolded on Long Island in the setting September sun, it would have been so iconic that Bradley would have wanted a chance to replicate it.

You mean that Prez Cup they almost lost?  The one where Tiger picked himself and then couldn't get out of bed on Saturday?  I'd say it was lucky for all involved that it took place at Zero Dark Thirty.

Keegan as a playing captain would be a story, and writers (not to mention bloggers) will have have a bias towards easy content, but there seems precious little understanding of his obligations in accepting the captaincy.

Bradly had the support of this outspoken critic:

Brandel Chamblee said five of the captain’s picks weren’t surprising to him, and it essentially came down to if Bradley would pick himself, which would likely leave off Maverick McNealy or Sam Burns. But when Bradley was rattling off his picks on live TV Wednesday and skipped over himself in the standings to get to the next player, it was a clear hint he wasn’t calling his own number.

“I think he may well have won the Ryder Cup in making that decision,” Chamblee said on Golf Channel after the picks were made. “When you start to look at a captaincy or at a team, it’s never any one thing that makes a great player or a great captain, but it’s an assembly of a lot of little things like a mosaic.

fair enough, but then Brandel has to remind us how clever he is and adds this absurd detail:

“And in the same way you got the sense when Luke Donald, in opening ceremonies in 2023 got up and spoke Italian for two or three minutes, you thought, this Ryder Cup is over,” he continued. “Because if he spent and thought about it in that kind of detail how to open the ceremony, what was the rest of the week going to be like and how thorough had he thought about things? So Keegan Bradley just thinking about the decision to pick himself, that’s what a leader does, make a personal sacrifice for the collective good of a team. It’s the kind of thing a leader would do that would get his team to sort of run through a wall for him. Imagine the rest of that week; he’s going to look at them and be like, I stepped aside to focus on every little detail to help you guys, and how empowering that must be for his team.”

Seer how much I can learn from Brandel.  because I did watch that opening ceremony and I remember Luke going native, though my reaction focused more on his horrible accent than the finality Brandel allegedly saw.  I might be curious as to whether he shared that finality with his Golf Channel viewers, but it's Brandel.

This is a largely sensible take:

Keegan Bradley got robbed of his Ryder Cup dream. He’s built a new one

First, not too shabby a substitute dream, but I'd also not be so quick to rule him out in 2027 and beyond.

Shane Ryan, though, is a bit more introspective:

Voices: Keegan Bradley's sacrifice was noble. It resulted from a year of bad decisions

I had to ask Keegan Bradley the question at his Ryder Cup press conference on Wednesday, because it's been on my mind for about a month: "Do you agree with the statement that if the

Ryder Cup captain were anyone other than Keegan Bradley, Keegan Bradley would be playing on the team?"

He did the right thing by giving a non-answer to the hypothetical—"how could we ever know that?"—but after his snub in 2023, and the ensuing sympathetic depiction on Netflix’s “Full Swing” that got public sentiment so much on his side that the powers-that-be made the shocking decision to name him captain, it seems inconceivable that any other captain would have repeated the snub. We'll never know, but it sets up a somewhat agonizing thought: The only way to keep him off the team in 2025 was to name him captain. Looked at a certain way, it's like an ironic curse from the golf gods.

Let it be said that Bradley did something very noble by leaving himself off the team, and it speaks well for how he'll function as a leader at Bethpage Black next month. He claimed the decision had been made for some time, with other reports from the past two days indicating it was a bit more uncertain. And while we may never know the specifics of how close he came to picking himself, we can safely say it's the decision that keeps the narrative from spinning out of control, puts any distraction to the side and lets him lead as captain with crystal-clear focus.

So, he acted like an adult.  Easy to see why that surprised everyone after watching the behavior of our elite players the last few years.

This is a point worth making as well:

He could have been a great player for the team, but there are other great players to choose from, and the captaincy job is so comprehensive and time-consuming that dividing your energies is a huge risk in a few different ways. Just ask Europe—they've been eager for a year for Bradley to take on both duties, and reports indicate that Luke Donald agreeing to the addendum allowing a vice captain to take over while Bradley played was based in part in Europe's eagerness for that exact scenario to play out.

Yes, though amusingly that Rory guy couldn't stay on script, and just had to tell Keegan he would be crazy to do both.

But Shane is about the only guy that seems to remember how we got here:

But there's another element that has to be recognized here, and it's not so uplifting. The truth is, none of this had to happen. Bradley only found himself in this position as a result of a series of baffling and bad decisions that began a year ago, in July 2024, with naming him the captain in the first place.

As I wrote at the time, it was impossible to call Bradley's appointment a good choice or a bad choice, because it truly came from out of left field (and was apparently floated and approved over a short phone call). He had no experience even as a vice-captain, wasn't so beloved of his peers that he stood out as a natural leader and seemed to be based entirely on the fact that Tiger Woods said no and that they felt bad for Bradley for being left out of the squad in Rome. Which, it has to be said, is a strange reason to make that choice. The biggest problem with it, though, is exactly what came to pass—he might play! As I wrote then, "What if, like last time, he has a solid argument for making the team as a captain's pick, and finds himself having to make a tough call … on himself?"

And that's not to pat myself on the back—it was entirely foreseeable by everybody except, apparently, those making the decision. True, the otherwise successful task force had failed to prepare a younger generation of captains beyond Zach Johnson, and true, they got unlucky with Tiger and Phil Mickelson leaving the scene. But it wouldn't have been hard to name an experienced guy like Stewart Cink, or to pick Jim Furyk again with the vow that he'd take on a fleet of younger vice-captains like Webb Simpson and Brandt Snedeker and Kevin Kisner who would be ready to take over in 2027. Instead, they took the radical path, and the radical path has almost always backfired when it comes to choosing a Ryder Cup captain (see: the legacy of Ted Bishop).

Let's go even further back and remember that this logically would have been Phil's turn. How'd that work out?

Then Tiger turned it down because.... Well, because those negotiations with the Saudis were so time-consuming.... Are you done laughing yet?  Of course, that may not be why Tiger really turned it down, because his buddy McManus has the next Ryder Cup at his Adare Manor, and is anyone but your humble blogger wondering whether shekels will change hands under the table?

But here I'll part ways with Shane:

Just after the Travelers, though, Bradley had what I thought was a golden opportunity to have the best of both worlds. By resigning the captaincy then and putting his fate in the hands of whoever took over next, he would have almost surely cemented his place on the team—again, who's going to say no at that point?—and simultaneously assured that he'd be a shoo-in for a future captaincy. Instead, they pushed ahead with the idea of a playing captain, which hasn't been tried in the Ryder Cup in the modern era, and ended up as a near disaster when Woods, as a playing captain, and his American Presidents Cup team nearly blew it against an inferior international squad in Melbourne 2019. (Again, we note Europe's eagerness to manifest that reality.)

Two months later, this is the fruit of that decision—a player who frankly deserves to be on the team, and would be under any other captain's tenure, but can't because he was set up by U.S. leadership (and himself) to be stuck in the "damned if you do, gutted if you don't" situation we saw this week.

Shane, are you really suggesting that, having accepted the captaincy, that he should unceremoniously dump it when it suited his purposes?  And that that would be serving U.S. interests?

As Shane points out, the choice of Bradley was highly flawed, both in terms of the substance and the process.  I've never been a Keegan Bradley fan, not the least bit surprising in view of his Red Sox loyalty, but also his itchy-scratchy nature (probably too close there to my own).  But, while he may have muddied the waters with some of his statements, I think at the end of the day he did the adult thing, and I respect him for that.

But those saying that the U.S. is fielding a weaker team as a result of this series of decision have a point.  Folks have mostly focused on Keegan's 11th place status in the Ryder Cup points list but, far more impressively, Keegan is No. eleven in the OWGR.  The whole purpose of the Task Force was to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, yet we find gun powder residue on everyone involved.

But, if you're frustrated with Keegan not being on the roster, please direct your cards and letters to Eldrick.

I'm eyeing the exit and planning to use Dylan Dethier's Monday Finish column for a quickie update on the Euros, but first this was his spot-on assessment before Keegan made his picks known:

As for the U.S. side? They had a funny week. It felt like there were seven or so guys vying for the final four spots and most of ’em played well and finished within a few shots of each other; Patrick Cantlay (15 under, T2) led the charge followed by Cam Young (14 under, T4), Sam Burns and Keegan Bradley (13 under, T7) and Ben Griffin and Chris Gotterup (12 under, T10). I think Cantlay, Young and Griffin are in — which leaves Burns vs. Bradley for the final spot. For the second Ryder Cup in a row.

And it's Burns for the second time in a row.....

And now that Eurotrash update:

If you read last week’s Monday Finish you were well-prepared for this weekend’s intriguing Team Europe drama: Rasmus Hojgaard missed the FedEx Cup playoffs which may have actually helped his chances at making the Ryder Cup team. He returned to Europe, where there were points still available; he then nearly won his home Danish Championship. That set up this week: If Rasmus finished top 30 he’d be in automatically. If he finished outside the top 30? He may not have shown the recent form to make the team. In that situation he might even be replaced by his twin brother Nicolai. How insane is that?

Rasmus finished T13, earning his spot. Nicolai finished second — but probably won’t make this team. They shared a brief, meaningful embrace. I’m guessing Team Europe is all but set now: they’ve traded one twin for another and kept the other 11 players (plus the captain) in place. But is it possible they’d go off-script, swapping out Sepp Straka for Nicolai?!

Straka is in eighth place, so are we that sure about Fitzy and Viktor (who are lower)?  I think Luke will stick with chalk when he makes his picks on Monday.

Have a great holiday weekend and we'll catch up next week.

Weekend Wrap - Tommy Lad Edition

Well, that was some intense drama, no?  Yeah, just kidding, though folks will be appropriately happy for the Southport boy.

FedEx Follies - He's a seemingly good guy that has earned the outpouring of affection, but would now be a good time to remind folks that he beat exactly twenty-nine other guys?  That's less a tournament than it is a Thursday Night league match.

Here's Geoff's take:

Tommy Fleetwood finally won on American soil. Even better, he’s a FedExCup champion without having to survive the whole season-long algorithm, stroke starting, net thingy. Win. Win.

A final round 68 at supposedly-soaking-wet-requiring-preferred-lies East Lake allowed Fleetwood to hold off several stubborn challengers who wilted under the Atlanta Tour Championship heat. Fleetwood was a fan favorite to finally earn a breakthrough official win after near misses, followed by relentless grace.

“They're amazing,” he said of the fan support. “It makes me a bit emotional. I'm always lucky with the support that I get. I said this last month or so when I've been in contention, it's been amazing, and to get the support like that is just so special, and I never want to lose that.”

Fleetwood earned the $10 million first prize in his 164th career start and after 30 career top-five finishes. The 34-year-old seven-time DP World Tour winner arrived at the 2025 Tour Championship as one of just two players in the field winless on the PGA Tour (Jacob Bridgeman was the other).

The breakthrough victory provided a satisfying conclusion to the official stroke play season. Now we’re on to a Ryder Cup race full of juicy subplots now that Europe’s points race ended Sunday with this week’s announcement naming the six American Captain’s picks.

Satisfactory?  Is that what they were going for?

To some extent the Tour has finally taken my advice and made this merely a shootout, though it's awfully precious how they insist on still calling it a season-long event.... Let's face it, they say a lot of things, which is why we've long since stopped listening.

Geoff had some other thoughts:

As for the latest iteration of the Tour Championship, another hot, gloomy and (apparently) soaking wet week at East Lake accelerated talk of a new venue. The twice-overhauled course is under contract through 2027. Yet with fantastic fan support and a good test on Sunday despite the spirit of the rules debacle, East Lake seemed like the least of the Tour’s credibility-killing elements. The formation of a competition committee to upend the way things are currently done now looms over both the venue and the FedExCup.

“[The committee] is aimed at a holistic relook of how we compete on the Tour,” new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp said. “That is inclusive of regular season, postseason, and offseason.”

Playing the ball as it lies would be a nice place to start.

The PGA Tour’s decision to play “preferred lies” all four days seemed especially absurd given the incredible conditioning on display at East Lake. The Tour should have invoked model local rule E-2 to allow players to mark, clean, and replace a mudball in fairways. This would have prevented the shenanigans that now come with entitled players running the tour and taking one club-length relief. (Collin Morikawa used the situation to improve his angle on a putt from the fringe. That’s not remotely close to the purpose of preferred lies.)

Throw in all the smash-burgering in the rough to improve lies, and it’s hard to see how the PGA Tour is a serious organization deserving of a governance voice until they get control back from players who only think of themselves.

Tell us what you really think, Geoff.  But if you were missing Nurse Ratched's B-school speak, Rolapp has us covered with his holistic relook..... Though he seems to want to ignore the eighteen years of holistic relooks that got us where we are.

The Tour Confidential panel is mostly focused elsewhere, but this Q&A is worth a moment:

Tommy Fleetwood won the Tour Championship (and $10 million FedEx Cup first prize) on Sunday at East Lake. Why do you think Fleetwood’s win seemed to resonate for so many — LeBron James included?

Dethier: Golf will inevitably beat you down, especially when you’re not playing the kind of golf you want, but somehow it never beat Fleetwood down. There’s no cynicism there and no nasty ego — just an earnest attempt each and every time out. It’s hard to imagine anybody rooting against Fleetwood. And my gosh, he’s good. For anybody who’s ever come close but fallen short at anything, he’s a model for how to respond.

Schrock: I think the main thing that has made people gravitate toward Tommy is the eternal optimism he has shown in the face of some crushing disappointments. It’s his ability to be open and vulnerable in the moments after defeat and his relentless positivity as he climbs toward his goals that resonate. I think people want to root for people who are authentically themselves, and there is a magnetism in seeing someone fall and continue to get up and finally get across the line. Think Rory at the Masters, but on a smaller scale.

Melton: Sports fans love a story of redemption — and Tommy fits the bill. Watching someone summit the mountaintop after so many heartbreaks will always be compelling. Count me among those who smiled once that final putt dropped.

I think his optimism is important, but perhaps the biggest factor is that he showed up to speak with us after each of his devastating losses.  Let's try a thought experiment: Can you imagine Tommy lad looking into a camera and telling us he doesn't owe anybody anything?  Yeah, it's a pretty low bar, yet guys like Morikawa and Rory can't seem to clear it.

It's a nice win for Tommy in that it puts this one issue to bed.  I already knew he would be a force at Bethpage, and this certainly can only help.  But the field is simply too small to credit the win as anything more than a glorified exhibition.

I would further add that, setting aside this popular guy getting his first "W, the Ryder Cup implications are the only thing that leant any gravitas to the week.

Bethpage Glide Path - So, how will we occupy ourselves for the next month?  Golf is off the table and I think we can safely rule out watching any baseball....

You'll know where things stand with the Ryder Cup, with Keegan to inform us of his choices from Frisco, TX on Wednesday morning.  Any discussion of his picks starts with this one dilemma:

The biggest decision on Wednesday might be if Bradley picks himself to be a playing captain. At East Lake, he admitted his situation is “unique” because of his age (39). “You worry that people maybe on my side will say, if you don’t win, that was a mistake, that was self-indulgent,” he said. “I’m very well aware of that. No matter what decision I make, I’m going to be defined by this decision. If we win, it doesn’t matter what decision I make.” While we already know your opinion on if Keegs should pick himself, do you think it was unfair for the PGA of America to put him in this situation in the first place? Should they have looked for a captain who wouldn’t have had to worry about the potential distraction of playing too?

Dethier: What I’m most intrigued by, looking back, is the fact that Bradley’s selection came with the subtext that the PGA of America didn’t think he’d make the team. For a guy who loves proving people wrong, that must have been welcome fuel. But now that we’re here? I just think it’s awesome. I think he’s provided a spark to the squad and to the U.S. fans. I think it’s fun to see somebody pull double duty; this is a miniature version of Shohei Ohtani or Travis Hunter playing both ways. Sports are supposed to be fun and cool, after all. This makes the Ryder Cup that much more interesting.

Schrock: I think the issue is the captain’s cupboard was pretty bare, with Tiger seemingly uninterested and Phil being, you know, Phil. The PGA of America needed to find a captain and, let’s be honest, they needed to change things up. Based on Scheffler’s quotes about having a captain who is around the top players all the time and knows and understands them, I think the move actually had its intended effect. As Dylan noted, if it also brought the best out of Keegan as a player, that’s a bonus and will make for an electric week at Bethpage.

Melton: It’s still a head-scratcher that Keegan was selected as captain. Seems to me this was the consolation prize after he was snubbed for Rome. Was it an outside-the-box move? Yes — but on what merits? It’s not like the guy has been a stalwart for U.S. teams his entire career. To make a baseball analogy, would Aaron Boone be the manager of the Yankees if he didn’t hit a walk-off home run in 2003? No, and we see how that’s going. Would Keegan Bradley be the Ryder Cup captain if he’d unpacked his suitcase after the 2014 Ryder Cup?

A lot going on here, but I want to start at the beginning, about which only Josh Schrock even hints.  He focuses on the cupboard being bare, but gives  a certain guy a pass.  Remember when the Task Force was formed and Tiger was all in (with his great buddy Phil) to do anything and everything to ensure U.S. Ryder Cup success?  The captain of this team should have been Tiger, who simply couldn't be bothered showing up, for the laughable reason that the negotiations with PIF take up too much of his time.  So that guy will be on his couch playing Call of Duty on Ryder Cup weekend....

Dylan sees this as a snub related to Keegan's chances, which is a fair point.  Though I think it far more likely that they fell in love with the idea of Keegs (which isn't crazy), but simply ignored that his age could result in this dilemma.

So, let's see what the writers think:

With the conclusion of the Tour Championship on Sunday, U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley will now complete his squad with six captain’s picks he’ll make on Wednesday. Scottie Scheffler, J.J. Spaun, Xander Schauffele, Russell Henley, Harris English and Bryson DeChambeau are already on the squad. Put on your captain’s cap and name the six wild-card picks YOU would make.

Dylan Dethier: Gimme Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Ben Griffin, Patrick Cantlay, Cameron Young and Keegan Bradley. Don’t think anybody else needs to answer — those are the correct picks.

Josh Schrock: I have the same six as Dylan. I think it would be electric if Keegan took Sam Burns and left Ben Griffin at home just for the #BoysClub discourse, but those are the right six.

Zephyr Melton: How about Keegan takes Burns over HIMSELF and focuses on his duties as captain? The fact that the U.S. gave the captaincy to a guy who’s got four career Ryder Cup points simply because he got his feelings hurt last time is absurd enough. Let’s not compound errors.

 Geoff had these thoughts:

Captain Keegan Bradley has options. And maybe that’s how “the toughest decision” of his life just got more painful.

Appealing candidates like Cameron Young (T4 at East Lake) and Sam Burns (T7) have emerged to round out USA’s Ryder Cup team possibilities in a year where American depth seemed thin. Patrick Cantlay threw his hat into the equation entered the chat with a strong week too, but it seems a little late in the race to be given strong consideration. But he is on every one of the PGA Tour’s 85 committees, and his whining is the primary reason the USA team will be paid this year. Never underestimate Task Force politics!

Captain Bradley started the week face-to-face with Arnold Palmer’s player-captain bag at player registration. Bradley mentioned longing to ask the King what he’d do in a sticky situation that is not of his doing.

That last bit is ironic, no, given that we spent much of the summer hoping that Morikawa and Rory would channel their inner Arnie, only to end disappointed.  Of course, Keegan might want to ask Arnie, but Arnie is one of the all-time legends f the game, whereas Keegan is...well, not quite that.

Let's see what else Geoff has:

With the official points race having ended after the recent BMW Championship, the Ryder Cup Data Analytics And Geek Squad will let Bradley know the latest numbers as if the ranking continued through East Lake. Bradley finished the 2025 season 11th in the official standings behind Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Ben Griffin, and Maverick McNealy.

Assuming Captain Bradley would not drop any of the aforementioned who finished ahead of Keegan Bradley, that leaves two spots left to fill from the firm of Bradley, Harman, Young, Cantlay and Burns. In normal times, this would be a dreamy problem to have. But the weird brew of a playing captaincy when the Captain has won twice since being named, those invisible Task Force politics, the perception of needing length off-the-tee to handle Bethpage, and the preference to pick those who have done well on big stages should factor into the decision.

The prime candidates:

• Brian Harman posted a final round 63 to finish T13, finished 12th in the unofficial standings but seems least likely to get a positive phone call. He’s hung around the points list largely off his second place in the 2024 Players. Harman went 2-2-0 in Rome but 0-3-0 in the 2024 Presidents Cup.

• Cameron Young has gone 1st-5th-11th-T4 since missing The Open cut. He has posted a course record at Bethpage in the New York State Open while having the distance, momentum, and history of success on huge stages (2022 Open at St Andrews). “Obviously I really, really want to make that team,” Young said after Sunday’s final round. “If that call goes the wrong way in my opinion, it's going to be a bit of a hard one to take. I feel like I've done everything you could ask of me to make that team over the last four weeks, and then if you look back further, really half a season.”

• Sam Burns ended an unusual season with a T4 at Caves Valley and T7 at East Lake. He lost in a Canadian Open playoff and was in the final U.S. Open pairing with a great shot before ugly weather, uglier lies in fairways and delays derailed his chances. He went 1-2-0 in Rome and 3-0-1 in the 2024 Presidents Cup. “Definitely my No. 1 goal coming into this year,” Burns said of making the team following the final round at East Lake. “Unfortunately, I didn't put myself in a position to be an automatic qualifier. I think it takes a lot of stress off certainly this week and last week to be in that position. I know whatever decision [Bradley] makes is going to be one that he thinks is best for the team. Ultimately, I'm Team USA. If I'm on the team, awesome. I would love nothing more. If I'm not, I'll be rooting for them.”

• Keegan Bradley won the Travelers in June and then went T41-T30-MC-T44-T17-T7 to wrap up the season. He is also said to have a rapport with the Captain. The 12th-ranked player in the world shot 64-63 in the middle rounds of the Tour Championship. After finishing 11th in points while getting bypassed for the 2023 Ryder Cup team, Bradley went 2-1-0 in last year’s Presidents Cup. He has an 8-5-2 record in team appearances and never forget those CVS Health Charity Classic wins with Jon Curran!

If Keegan weren't the captain, I believe that Keegan would be picked for the team, based mostly upon his fiery personality and love of the event (though with him in the top 12 we don't need to rationalize it).  But Keegan can't pick THAT Keegan, the one unburdened by the obligations of the captaincy.  And, to the extent that you believe he was the right choice, it feels a bit odd to allow him to play and not be there for the other obligations of the captaincy.  For instance, the captain's presence on the golf supporting his players is of arguable value, but do we think Kevin Kizner will be an effective stand-in there?

What I have thought from the moment he was give the captaincy is very much supported by Keegan Bradley himself, at least in his initial reaction.  I never read his comments as a promise to not pick himself, but rather as an acknowledgement that it's a dicey proposition to try to do both.  My take has always been that Keegan should play only if his performance makes him indispensable to the U.S. team.  However, in finishing 11th in the points race and not doing anything notable in the final few weeks, he's left himself a viable but not life-altering choice.

Therefore, given the uncertainties and complications of a player-captain, it seems pretty clear to me that he shouldn't pick himself.  I think Geoff is correct that those above him will be chosen, and I expect Cam Young will be as well.  I'd take Mav McNealy or Brian Harman with the last pick.  

That means the biggest Ryder Cup snub will be…

Dethier: Maverick McNealy. The numbers say he’s the best guy not on my team, but he just hasn’t done enough this summer to jump out as a must-pick.

Schrock: The numbers might say McNealy, but I think the biggest snub is Burns, who was nails at the Presidents Cup and pairs well with Scheffler.

Melton: Likely Burns because we all know Keegan is picking himself…

I'm not a fan of calling these snubs, because Dylan Dethier has it right, but his point applies equally to Burns and Keegan as well.  None of these guys have played well enough to deserve a pick, and it can't be a snub if the pick wasn't earned.

There's news on the European team as well, although it's news that effectively changes nothing:

Ryder Cup bound: Rasmus Hojgaard qualifies for the 2025 European Ryder Cup team

Rasmus Hojgaard is Ryder Cup bound but not without some tense moments.

“I’ve been so stressed out,” he said.

The 24-year-old Dane knew the job at hand on Sunday at the Belfry Resort & Hotel at Sutton Coldfield, England, and he delivered. Hojgaard shot a final-round 1-under 71 to finish T-13 at the Betfred British Masters.

“Every hole felt like a tough battle,” Hojgaard said. “I’m over the moon.”

Hojgaard entered the week in eighth place in the European Ryder Cup points race and the Betfred British Masters served as the final qualifying tournament before the top six in the standings would automatically make Team Europe. He needed to finish T-29 or better to leapfrog No. 7 Sepp Straka and No. 6 Shane Lowry and make his first team. Straka and Lowry opted to compete in the Tour Championship, where no Ryder Cup points were available.

Which only means that Straka and Lowry will play as Captain's picks.  As noted previously, the Euros will return eleven out of twelve players from the winning 2023 team, and that unfortunate twelfth guy will be replaced by his identical twin.   I do hope they saved the caddie bibs from Rome, as they can all be reused.

A lot of discussion over the weekend as to which team should be favored.  The U.S. is and will be favored, for the simple reason that the last decade of Ryder Cups has featured home team dominance.  

That's it for today.  I'll logically be back next on Thursday, when we can put Keegan's picks under a microscope.  Have a great week.

Thursday Threads - Dog Days of August Edition

It's difficult to summon up much enthusiasm for blogging this time of year, although at least East Lake has deep-sixed their staggered start.  Shall we see what's available for our amusement?

Meet The New Boss - It's changing of the guard time in Atlanta:

As Jay Monahan shook hands with Brian Rolapp, welcomed him to the podium and stepped off the stage, it felt like a meaningful transition for the future of professional golf.

The contrast was obvious. It was even sartorial: Monahan in a structured blue blazer handing off to Rolapp in a more casual light gray, the low-handicap golf lifer handing off to the man who barely plays, the longtime commissioner forged in the fires of the PGA Tour handing off to the longtime NFL executive, a literal and figurative move towards something new.

Rolapp has only been in the job a few weeks, so it’s far too early to judge any type of performance. It might be silly to read into an introductory press conference at all. But if Step 1 is talking a good game and Step 2 is making it happen, Rolapp seems to at least have the first part down. The word “impressive” is used a lot when people are asked about him, from players to media members to Tour staffers. And on Wednesday at the Tour Championship, in his first in-depth public appearance, three moments showed why.

Was this written by an actual journalist, or rather the Tour's PR department....  But I've been watching commissioners since Nurse Ratched show an aggressive disregard for nature of our game (just look at the history of this week's event), so what could go wrong with a guy that doesn't even play?

Dylan Dethier informs us that we should be impressed for at least three reasons, so prepare to be blown away:

1. “The goal is significant change.”

Rolapp stressed several times that he has been encouraged by the state of the PGA Tour that he’s inheriting. He cited a “strong roster” of partners. The sport is growing and the business is growing with it. He actually said twice that “the strength of the Tour is strong” and it’s a credit to his delivery that it almost seemed to make sense when he did.

But his emphasis was on change. He recycled a phrase from his initial letter: We’re going to honor tradition, but we will not be overly bound by it. And he declared that one of his first acts as CEO is to create the “Future Competition Committee” aimed at revisiting the Tour’s competitive model.

“The purpose of this committee is pretty simple: We’re going to design the best professional golf competitive model in the world for the benefit of PGA Tour fans, players and their partners,” Rolapp said. “It is aimed at a holistic relook of how we compete on the Tour. That is inclusive of regular season, postseason and off-season.”

And then he doubled down on that idea of a holistic relook.

"The strength of the tour is strong", eh?  Did he write that himself or were ghostwriters employed?

Who doesn't crave the odd holistic relook, is it truly necessary with the Tour's strength being so..., what's that word again, strong?

Would it be wrong of me to note that the subject of his "relook" has just been restructured by the best minds in sports to capture all holistic requirements... So, Brian seems to be saying that those best minds are, well, hackers (and would someone please explain that term to the new Commish).

And Rollap is quite unhappy with that prior work it seems:

“The goal is not incremental change,” he said. “The goal is significant change.”

Feel free to believe it when you see it, of course. This is not a league known for its dynamic decision-making, and while this committee will have golf gravitas — Tiger Woods is serving as chair — it’s largely made up of establishment figures that have served on other Tour boards and committees like Adam Scott, Patrick Cantlay, Maverick McNealy, John Henry and Joe Gorder. The addition of baseball’s reimagination wizard Theo Epstein is intriguing, as is the committee’s entire directive. But it’s also fair to hold a little skepticism that real change starts with the formation of another committee.

Well, you knew Cantlay, the Terrific Penis, would be at the table.  I hate to sound cynical, but the very guys that just restructured the Tour to grab more of its riches will still be in charge.... what could possibly go wrong?

Dylan's sycophancy is more than a bit off-putting, as you'll quickly discern from this seminal exchange:

2. “The sports business is not that complicated”

What draws people to Rolapp is not that he’s particularly dynamic but instead that he makes complex stuff sound simple. I asked him whether there have been any jarring changes coming from the NFL and its kajillion-dollar business to the PGA Tour, which is a decidedly different sport and, I would think, a completely different business. He more or less shrugged.

“It’s a lot hotter in Ponte Vedra than it is in Manhattan this time of year,” he said.

Not sure I'm equipped to keep up with the 3D chess he's playing there....

To the extent that there was any actual substance, this was it:

Rolapp outlined three pillars the Tour wants to double down on: further committing to a meritocratic structure (he called this parity), making it feel special when the Tour’s best players come together (this was “scarcity”) and doing a better job of connecting the regular season and the postseason to elevate the entire product (he called this “simplicity”).

Well, Brian, that Cantlay guy will be all in on meritocracy, as long as the riffraff are kept far away from those huge money grabs....

He does seem to be doubling down on those tiny-field money grabs, but he would have the job is he didn't  More substantively, those two concepts are diametrically opposed, and I don't suspect the Tour rabbit community to be encouraged by anything they heard this week.

This second item is interesting as well:

The new PGA Tour CEO knows you won’t read this

The passive-aggressive header is a reference to this:

“Anybody who’s in the sports business, their general competition is for the mind share of sports fans and for their time,” Rolapp said. “[Sports leagues want to capture attention] in a complicated world that is increasingly disrupted by technology, where you have a million things to do with your time, a million alternatives.”

Rolapp was responding to a question from Yahoo‘s Jay Busbee about comments made by his old boss, Roger Goodell, who reportedly said the NFL’s primary competition was not the NBA or MLB but “Apple and Google.”

Hmmmm.  Is that why the Tour is wrapping the week before Labor Day?  Because Google and Apple kick off in September?   Here's some additional drivel: 

“You just have to constantly innovate,” Rolapp said, hinting at an appetite for change that could come to define his tenure. “I think if there’s anything I learned at the NFL, it’s that we did not sit still. We changed rules every March. We changed the kickoff rule. That’s what I mean by honoring tradition but not being bound by it. I think that level of innovation is what we’re going to do here, and I think that’s one lesson I’ve learned.”

Innovation. Interest. Intrigue. The lesson here is that it’s all related because it’s all drawing attention.

“Look, the sports business is not that complicated,” Rolapp said. “You get the product right, you get the right partners, your fans will reward you with their time because they’re telling you it’s good and they want more of it, and then the commercial and the business part will take care of itself.”

In all, the message seems clear: With Rolapp at the helm, there are few sacred cows at the PGA Tour.

There may be few, but I do notice that each and every sacred cow seems to have a seat on the committee....

Eamon Lynch has his characteristically incendiary thoughts on this subject:

Lynch: New CEO Brian Rolapp just ended the PGA Tour as we know it, even if he didn’t say it out loud

The man writes the best ledes in the business, even if they're not exactly realized in the piece.

As the owner of more than 180 patents, inventor and businessman Charles Kettering knew of

what he spoke when he said the best way to kill an idea is to get a committee working on it. Yet collective panels often serve a purpose for those who convene them, as evidenced by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which exists to provide air cover for what a powerful chief executive has already decided will happen. The CCP has 205 members, and 204 of those votes don’t outweigh the one of Xi Jinping.

On Wednesday, the PGA Tour’s new CEO, Brian Rolapp, announced the creation of the Future Competition Committee, which is charged with aggressively re-examining the Tour’s entire business model. It could be airily dismissed as a talking shop, an exercise in keeping minutes while losing months, but Rolapp’s star chamber has the potential to author — or at least sign off on — the most seismic shake-up in the organization’s history.

Whiplash alert, after likening him to Xi, he then undermines that assertion of control with this:

In some respects, Rolapp will have less executive authority at the Tour than existed in his past gig. The veteran NFL executive spent over 20 years in a sport with one authority, with players who are contracted, where fans and broadcasters know who’s playing each week, and where his outfit owned the biggest event. Now he’s in a sport with multiple bodies running things, with talent that isn’t contracted, in which fans and broadcasters have no guarantee who will play, and where — despite being arguably the most influential entity in golf — he controls none of the game’s five biggest events.

Tackling that inequity head-on is a fool’s errand. Players will not consent to being contracted, and even armed with a billion-five from Strategic Sports Group, he’d struggle to acquire the PGA Championship or Ryder Cup, given how many PGA of America snouts would need to be dislodged from the trough. So other than creaming off a percentage of the revenue generated by the majors — and make no mistake, the Tour is coming for its share of that — the best he can do is streamline and elevate his own product.

So, where are we going with all this, Eamon?

What does that look like?

In both public comments and meetings with staff, Rolapp has said that every successful sports league requires three things, and that the PGA Tour currently only has one of them. That’s competitive parity, notwithstanding Scottie Scheffler performing on a different plane than his contemporaries. The two elements he believes are lacking are simplicity and scarcity.

That Scheffler bit seems odd, as the biggest issue with golf is the excessive level of parity, to wit, that the best players win so infrequently.  Let's let Eamon continue:

The Tour doesn’t have simplicity in any realm. Not in the structure of its season-long points race, not in the format of its playoffs, not in the eligibility criteria for issuing cards and filling fields. Until a change was announced in May, there wasn’t even simplicity in the scoring system for the Tour Championship finale. This muddied administrative system is the product of decades of compromises and sops to the membership and other constituents. Flicking away that scab will be painful for many.

The most crucial of Rolapp’s philosophical pillars is scarcity. The Tour’s 2026 regular season schedule has 38 stops, not including the Fall tournaments, and features four weeks when two events are staged concurrently. That’s closer to saturation than scarcity. Rolapp’s committee is a mechanism to right-size a product that has long been based (and its executives bonused) on one criteria — creating playing opportunities for members. In short, the Tour incentivized its leaders to dilute the product for parochial interests.

We all understand that the Tour has way too many events, but we also understand that they need enough events to allow new talent to rise.  Not to mention field sizes sufficiently large to be credible, though we all know that the elite players covet the LIV model, and no doubt they will have their way.

Back To The Future - The Tour's 2026 schedule has dropped, and guess where we're going back to?

10 changes, surprises from PGA Tour’s 2026 schedule release

1. They’re headed back to Doral

The PGA Tour is returning to one of President Trump’s venues for the first time since he took office in 2016; the “Miami Championship” is scheduled for the week of April 27-May 3. The tournament sponsor hasn’t been finalized but the tournament has been denoted as a Signature Event, which is particularly notable because…

Really?  I don't know, isn't that a little insurrectiony?

Didn't someone mention simplicity?  

2. There are now nine siggies.

Signature Events, if you want full government names. But the slate of siggies is the same as it was in 2024 other than the addition of Doral, which slides into the CJ Cup Byron Nelson’s spot on the calendar. If you’re thinking to yourself, wow, that’s a lot of siggies in a short period of time, that’s because…

3. There are a lot of siggies in a short period of time!

It’ll be a busy schedule for any top players trying to play all the biggest events. The Masters will kick off a wild stretch of five featured events in six weeks: Masters, RBC Heritage (Signature), Zurich Classic, Miami Championship (Signature), Truist Championship (Signature), PGA Championship. Until now, most eligible players have teed it up in most of these events. I’d bet we’ll see more strategic skips next year. It’ll also be an odd spot on the calendar for those without siggy privileges, which I suppose is good news for the Myrtle Beach Classic, which some pros may use as a PGA Championship tune-up. But it seems like bad news for the Valero (the week before the Masters), the Zurich (will Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry really return again? Seems unlikely) and two events post-PGA. Speaking of which…

Which just reminds us that the Tour's core business remains the screwing of its preexisting sponsors.  Zurich and Valero will quickly understand that once the ink dries on their sponsorship contracts.....

6. The Pebble-Riv double.

The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Genesis Invitational are scheduled for back-to-back weeks following the WM Phoenix Open; that’s particularly notable because they’re two siggies on arguably the Tour’s two greatest golf courses. Sunday night at the Super Bowl followed by a short drive down the coast? Nice work if you can get it.

Here’s hoping the Tour can pull off a return to Riviera, too, given the neighborhood was ravaged by wildfires last winter. The 2025 Genesis was moved to Torrey Pines; it’d be great to see the tournament provide a boost to the community if they can bring it back.

Just a reminder that this will be at a time that Tiger and Rory are trying to get bodies to South Florida on Monday and Tuesday evenings for the TGL Season Two.   Isn't it great being a Tour sponsor?

One last bit before my exit, Sean Zak helpfully fixes the Tour Championship, but includes some unintentional context:

How to fix the Tour Championship format

The most important thing you need to know about the Tour Championship — and how it will look in the future — is that it will need to appease and please at least five different parties: the Tour itself, the players, the TV rights holders, the sponsors (FedEx, chiefly) and the fans. Does that create a bit of a Rubik’s Cube, where solving for one impacts the others? Absolutely. But I think we make everyone mostly happy with what follows.

1. 30 players, just as there always has been. The Tour is obsessed with having 30 players advance to the TC. Thirty is a great number. It’s the third stage of the playoffs, and everyone who gets there gets a bunch of other stuff, too. They’ll start their season in Hawaii at the Sentry. They’ll also all get invited to the Masters. If we have more than 30 players at the Tour Championship — or much fewer than that number — something is either lost or gained. Thirty is a good number, and it keeps the Tour happy.

2. We begin with stroke play. Take it from Rory McIlroy, who spoke on the topic Tuesday: “I think it’s just hard for the players to reconcile that we play stroke play for every week of the year but then the season-ending tournament is going to be decided by match play. I think it was just hard for the players to get their heads around that.”

It’s true. Numerous players on the Tour Policy Board and PAC have said it. You can’t play stroke play all year long and suddenly have only a match-play championship. So we begin with all 30 players at the TC playing two rounds of stroke play.

If you say so, but lets see where you're going with this:

3. Both ends of leaderboard matter. The top two performers after 36 holes will receive a first-round bye on Match Play Saturday. That’s what everyone is after: a much easier road to victory that is earned by solid play. The top 14 players will make the cut, but that is only after a possible playoff for the 14th and final spot. If four players are tied for 13th after two rounds, it’s a four-for-two sudden playoff, which brings us to another part of the puzzle…

4. TV execs would love it. When you institute a 36-hole competition, the first 18 holes really matter. And what happens late in the second 18 holes really matters. In other words, that four-for-two playoff would play out late in the day on Friday, hopefully for primetime viewing on the East Coast. Right now, there is little reason at all to watch the second round of the Tour Championship. This would change that.

Read over that last 'graph a couple more times.  Because you know when those first two days don't matter?  Yeah, when you make your most important events tiny fields without a Friday cut.  Just sayin'!  Sean has just confirmed that there is little reason to tune into a Siggy before Sunday, not that we hadn't gotten there on our own.

5. Match Play Saturday. The sales team at the PGA Tour — to invoke an all-time comedy line — could sell (sponsorship of) a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves. With a nimble, made-for-TV Tour Championship, I am looking to give them new business opportunities, like Match Play Saturday. Where the 1- and 2-seed have byes into the quarterfinals, and where 4 plays against 13, and 5 plays against 12.

To add some names to those numbers, using scores from the 2024 TC, Collin Morikawa and Scottie Scheffler would have received byes. Tommy Fleetwood (seeded 13th) would have sneaked past 4-seed Sahith Theegala, only to find himself matched up against (and losing to) 5-seed Xander Schauffele in the afternoon. We would have six matches in the morning, and then four in the afternoon, once again ending in primetime. Before anyone doubts match play as a viable TV product, my colleague James Colgan very literally got Sam Flood, NBC executive producer, to comment on that:

“There’s no question match play would work for the PGA Tour playoffs,” Flood said. “It would be dramatic for TV, and if it was done the right way, it could be one of the great moments in golf.”

That sound like an endorsement?

6. Playoffs would feel like … playoffs! You’ve heard it countless times — that the FedEx Cup Playoffs need to feel more like actual playoffs. Where players/teams survive and advance from one stage to the next. This format would only lengthen the surviving and advancing period. We’d begin with 70 players, narrow down to 50, then to 30, then 14, eight and, after the quarterfinals, just four. This is where we check the sponsorship box, because for the entire month of August, it would feel like there is a more direct line between the start of the FedEx Cup Playoffs and the end. Between the divisional round and Super Bowl Sunday. That’s a win for the company that sponsors it all, and is probably the most important sponsor in all of pro golf.

7. Building to a Sunday Shootout. Match Play Saturday would create a final four as we move back to stroke play for a neat and orderly shootout. 1 v. 1 v. 1 v. 1, 18 holes, low man wins. This solves for any concerns about a blowout championship match, or any flukey winners. If you have advanced to the final 30, made the top-14 cut after two rounds, advanced through two matches and then beat three other golfers who did the same? You are absolutely worthy of being the FedEx Cup champion.

Look, it's probably a whole lot better than what we have now, but do we still need the first two weeks of the playoffs? 

For those who can’t quite imagine it just yet, I used the scores from the 2024 Tour Championship to get us as close as possible. Last year’s Sunday Shootout would have pitted Peak Xander Schauffele against Peak Scottie Scheffler against Peak Collin Morikawa against the birdie machine known as Wyndham Clark.

That kind of entertainment is how we check the box for fans.

Fans?  Why start worrying about them now?

But I especially loved the "Birdie machine known as Wyndham Clark".  Any chance we could hold it at Oakmont?  Because, Sean, he's become a bit of parody these days....

Ryder Cup Watch -  It is a bit interesting on both sides of the Atlantic, though there's not all that much to add.  I'll just riff on Dylan Dethier's work from his Monday Finish column:

Now what on Earth happens?

Team Europe faces a fascinating dilemma. We talked last week about its situation: 11 players from the 2023 team essentially locked in for an encore performance (Rory McIlroy, Robert MacIntyre, Tommy Fleetwood, Justin Rose, Tyrrell Hatton, Shane Lowry, Jon Rahm, Sepp Straka, Ludvig Aberg, Viktor Hovland and Matt Fitzpatrick) plus one complete wild-card spot with front-runners that included Rasmus Hojgaard (No. 8 on the points list) or Harry Hall (the top-ranked FedEx Cup finisher not already named). This week? Rasmus nearly won his home Danish Championship, making eagle at No. 18 to lose by one. Hall, meanwhile, finished solo 6th at the BMW Championship and is clearly in top form.

One particularly interesting wrinkle: Rasmus could play his way into the No. 6 spot on the team (and make himself an auto-qualifier) at this week’s British Masters, while Hall (still No. 17 on the points list) can’t earn any points at the Tour Championship. So what do you do?!

(Others who could still complicate the picture: Aaron Rai, back in action after missing the top 50 in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, last week’s winner Marco Penge, current Ryder Cup No. 11 Matt Wallace, Norwegian star Kristoffer Reitan and 2023 alum and Rasmus’ twin Nicolai Hojgaard.)

To sum up, it appears that Europe will return eleven of their twelve players from Rome, with the one missing being replaced by his identical twin.  Seriously!

Harry Hall is quite the interesting complication, especially since the man can putt.  The assumption is that, should Rasmus grab that sixth slot, the guy he replaces will be Shane Lowry, who presumably would have a Luke pick to fall back on.  Feels like pretty much a done deal as of now.

For the other guys:

The U.S. team’s situation seems even more confusing. Captain Keegan Bradley now has his six auto-qualifiers — Scottie Scheffler, J.J. Spaun, Xander Schauffele, Russell Henley, Harris English and Bryson DeChambeau. He also seems to have three more nearly guaranteed picks in 7-8-9: Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa and Ben Griffin. Patrick Cantlay at No. 15 also seems like a lock given his consistent form and his team history. But it’s messy. If you were looking for clarity you didn’t find it in Maryland; Maverick McNealy surged back into the conversation with a third-place finish while Sam Burns (T4) stated his case, too. Cameron Young (11th) played well for a third consecutive start while Bradley (T17) played well enough to show decent form, too. Cantlay (T30) and Morikawa (T33), meanwhile, finished closer to the bottom.

So now what do you do? Our most scientific solution is something like “lean on vibes.” No matter what happens at East Lake this week, though, we now appear to be hurtling towards a situation where Bradley’s is going to have to make some extremely tough decisions — the toughest being whether to pick himself.

And Dylan lays out how Keegs should decide:

ONE BIG QUESTION

Back to the Ryder Cup. What should Keegan Bradley do?!

This may sound very obvious, but let’s talk it through: U.S. captain Keegan Bradley should do whatever he thinks will give his team the best chance to win. If he feels like that involves him playing, and the competitive pressure of playing captain excites him, he should absolutely follow that instinct. If it seems like a terrifying prospect with unthinkable pressure amidst a laundry list of tasks, he should skip it. But he shouldn’t bother pandering to the inevitable second-guessing he’ll face; we’re so far down this that if the U.S. team loses he’ll get crushed and if they win he’ll be a hero and it’s hard to imagine an in-between.

Dylan obviously has some valid thoughts, though I come at it from quite the different perspective.  

Here are those current rankings:

1. Scheffler 2. Spaun 3. Schauffele 4. Henley 5. English 6. DeChambeau 7. Thomas 8. Morikawa 9. Griffin 10. McNealy 11. Bradley 12. Harman 13. Novak 14. Young 15. Cantlay

To me, those standings tell us all we need to know.  Obviously,. were Bradley not the captain, he'd be in the mix for captain's picks.  But, and it's a big but,. he is the captain and I think he actually got the answer right in his first stab at it.  the fact of the matter is that he's only gotten himself into the mix, he hasn't made himself irreplaceable as a player.  has he made a case that he's demonstrably better or more qualified than Mav McNealy, Brian Harman or Cam Young?  So, given that no one knows the implication of a playing captain and that he's not head-and-shoulders above the other guys, how is this even a question?

His acceptance of the captaincy imposes obligations on him to do what's in the best interests of the team, and not taking an unquantifiable risk for limited upside seems a no-brainer.  

That's it for today and the week.  Have a great weekend and we'll wrap things on Monday.

Weekend Wrap - Teen Angst Edition

Got to watch pretty much all of the golf yesterday thanks to hot and sticky August weather.  Despite some rumblings of thunder, it's now been a full 2 1/2 weeks without being struck by lightning.... so we've got that going for us.

Teenage Wasteland - Makes a guy feel old, but yesterday's final round match at the U.S. Amateur was believed to be the youngest combined age for the two final contestants, which barely reached 37 years.  As they say, I have bunions older than that.....

How was your summer?

When he gets back to class at Brockwood High School in Snellville, Ga., Mason Howell will have an enviable answer for anyone who asks.

In early June, Howell played his way into the U.S. Open at Oakmont with two qualifying rounds of 63, one month before earning medalist honors at the U.S. Junior Amateur in Texas. Those accomplishments alone would have made good schoolyard chatter. Now, though, the Brockwood senior-to-be has something even cooler to talk about with friends. With a 7-and-6 Sunday romp over Jackson Herrington, 19, of Dickson, Tenn on the Olympic Club’s Lake Course, Howell, 18, ran away with 125th U.S. Amateur Championship. The victory makes Howell the third youngest winner of the championship, surpassing Tiger Woods, and the first high schooler to hoist the Havemeyer Trophy since Matt Fitzpatrick in 2013.

“To be ahead of Tiger in anything is amazing,” Howell said. “I’m just so grateful for everything this week.”

You'd think his senior High School golf season would be more than a little surreal, no?

 To this observer, the most memorable moment of the week might have happened late Saturday:

He was also accustomed to the spoiler role. Over the past two days alone, Herrington, a rising sophomore at the University of Tennessee, had knocked off a pair of fan favorites: first, Jimmy Abdo, an underdog from Division III Gustavus Adolphus College in Minn, in the quarterfinals, followed by homegrown hero Niall Shiels-Donegan in a Saturday semifinal that drew what were believed to be the largest throngs at a U.S. Amateur since 1981, when Nathaniel Crosby (son of Bing, and a Bay Area native) won the title on the Lake Course. In front of a Crosby-size contingent cheering loudly for the other guy, Herrington, whose husky build has earned him the nickname “The Fridge,” had carded a cold-blooded birdie to close Shiels-Donegan out on 18.

Shiels-Donegan is a Scot whose family moved to Mill Valley (fictional home of B.J. Hunicutt, which you can Google if it doesn't ring a bell) when he was quite young, but that made him a local.  As frequently happens, though, after the emotional semi-final win, Herrington's Sunday was quite the letdown.  It's a frequent issue in these 36-hole final, because the grueling week can often leave the players running on fumes.

I was able to watch the Wednesday night round of 64, but then didn't check back in until the semi-finals.  My sense is that Howell's key match was his first, when he took out second seed Tommy Robinson in a big upset.  The Tour Confidential panel did at least seem to know that this event was on:

Mason Howell won the U.S. Amateur on Sunday, beating Jackson Herrington 7 and 6 at The Olympic Club. It was an eventful week in San Francisco, headlined by Howell’s victory but also by the run of John Daly II, the emergence of a DIII underdog, raucous crowds (and interviews!) surrounding a local favorite and more. What was your most memorable moment from the U.S. Am?

Colgan: Jimmy Abdo!!!! The 4,292nd-ranked amateur in the world made it into the quarterfinal

round of the biggest amateur event in the sport. I love an underdog story, and I’m not sure I’ve heard a better one in 2025 than Abdo’s, whose last four years have seen him left off his high school travel squad and D1 offer-less in the transfer portal. He made plenty of people remember his name at O-Club.

Piastowski: That I need to try a burger dog soon. Kidding, maybe. Colgan is right about Abdo — it’s one of the reasons why the Amateur is great. But I loved the crowds that Niall Shiels Donegan drew and his wild post-round interviews (which were conducted admirably by Golf Channel’s Brentley Romine). Another attraction of the Amateur is the up-closeness of the event, and this was certainly that.

Sens: The crowds that homegrown hero (and semifinalist) Niall Shiels-Donegan drew all week. Large and rowdy. And the pure joy that Shiels-Donegan demonstrated in putting on a clutch show for them. He didn’t win but he was the story of the week.

One fun aspect of the week was the ubiquitous presence of old friend and Walker Cup Nathan Smith, whom I had met several years back at U.S. Open Sectional Qualifying.   

That's Smith shaking hands with former Willow Ridge Assistant Pro Kent St. Charles at Old Oaks Country Club.  I very well remember my conversation with Kent before the event:

ME:  Kent, who are you paired with in Sectionals?

KENT: Some amateur I've never heard of.  I think his name was Nathan something.

ME: Not Nathan Smith?

KENT: Yeah, that's the guy.

ME:  You're a lucky bastard.

You know what the best part was?  After they finished, I introduced myself to Smith and told him how thrilled I was that my friend Kent got paired with him.  Can you guess how Nathan responded?   He told me how thrilled he was to be paired with Kent...  What a gracious man.

The point of Smith being on site was to complete the Walker Cup roster:

The U.S. Walker Cup team for next month’s match at Cypress Point is complete.

The USGA announced Sunday the remaining five selections to captain Nathan Smith’s 10-man squad – newly minted U.S. Amateur champion Mason Howell, Oklahoma’s Jase Summy, Texas’ Tommy Morrison, Notre Dame’s Jacob Modleski and mid-amateur Stewart Hagestad.

World No. 1 Jackson Koivun of Auburn was among the earlier selections, along with Virginia’s Ben James, Ole Miss’ Michael La Sasso, and Oklahoma State teammates Preston Stout and Ethan Fang.

A few of those names might be familiar, but the name that should have jumped off the page and grabbed you by the throat is Cypress Point.  The event is September 6th and 7th, and you'll want those dates highlighted on your calendar.  The last important event contested at this venue was...checking notes, The Match.  It's never too early to set your DVR.

Scottie In Full - This seems a tad hyperbolic to me:

Scottie Scheffler continues to amaze.

Starting the final round four strokes back, Scheffler stepped on the gas, shooting 3-under 67, and raced past Robert McIntyre to win the BMW Championship on Sunday in Owings Mills, Maryland.

The Ultimate Driving Machine? It’s been Scheffler, the world No. 1, who won for the fifth time, and joined Tiger Woods as the only player to win at least five times in consecutive seasons in the last 40 years. (Woods did it six times, most recently in 2006-07.)

Scheffler even had some Tiger-like heroics in capturing his 18th career PGA Tour title, delivering the knockout punch at the par-3 17th. Nursing a one-stroke lead, he missed the green to the left and faced a delicate pitch that he had practiced earlier in the week from 82 feet.

I don't see where he stepped on any gas pedal (with the exception of the pitch on No. 17).  Seems like he just went about his business, even gave MacIntyre life with two missed short putts but, as is usual, his C-game was plenty.

The TC Gang has run out of platitudes for Scottie, and who can really blame them.  So they logically focused on the Ryder Cup implications:

Scottie Scheffler won the second leg of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, the BMW Championship, but we also now know the six auto-qualifiers for the U.S. Ryder Cup team: Scheffler, J.J. Spaun, Xander Schauffele, Russell Henley, Bryson DeChambeau and Harris English. What’s your biggest takeaway from this week?

Josh Sens. That we can add an item to life’s list of certainties: death, taxes and Scottie Scheffler. But also ( despite Scheffler) the Europeans have a stronger team of automatic qualifiers than the

U.S. does. On paper, anyway.

James Colgan: Other than Scheffler 4X-ing his Ryder Cup counterparts in points? I learned that the Americans are lucky Justin Thomas and Collin Morikawa didn’t leapfrog DeChambeau. Bryson was a lock all along, and his auto-qualifier status quiets what could have been a tired news cycle about his deservedness.

Nick Piastowski: Scottie Scheffler’s really, really, really good. And he’s showing this might last a while. And that Robert MacIntyre versus the Bethpage boys and girls will be jolly fun. (But let’s keep it clean, gang.)

Not sure I really understand Colgan's point.  Bryson, JT and Collin all figure to be locks, though I'm not certain that that last guy deserves to be a lock.  Though the combination of "I don't Owe anybody anything" with "I'll wear a hat when I'm paid for it" moves the over/under for the switch of my allegiance from the U.S. to the Euros from midday Friday to...., wait for it, the Thursday Opening Ceremonies.

U.S. captain Keegan Bradley will round out his team with six captain’s picks made after next week’s Tour Championships. That means East Lake is most important for which Ryder Cup hopeful?

Josh Sens: It’s a tossup for me between Cam Young and Ben Griffin. Both have shown good form this year, especially Young of late. Young, in particular, has sounded like a man chomping at the bit, after being passed over for Rome and now with the Ryder Cup coming to his home state, and a course where he won the state am.

Colgan: I think it’s Griffin, who’s safely inside the top-12 but wants to remove all doubt. But don’t leave out Sam Burns, either, who woke up on Sunday in 16th on the U.S. rankings and has the benefit of previous Ryder Cup experience and a close friendship with Scottie Scheffler to help his candidacy.

Piastowski: It’s the captain himself. Finish in the top 10, and Bradley picks himself three days later. Finish 28th, and there’s some doubt. A ho-hum finish at the BMW didn’t exactly inspire him being selected, but a strong run at the Tour Championship will.

I think the Captain finds himself in unchartered waters and, given the absence of a predicate for what this would look like, probably needs to leave himself off the roster.  But Geoff has a funny bit in today's Quad post:

ChatGPT: Should Keegan Bradley Pick Himself?

Since millions now view ChatGPT as a consigliere, best friend, life coach, digital pet, or their even doctor, it’s not a longshot to wonder if Keegan Bradley will seek AI advice regarding his predicament. The new version of the fancy search engine is supposed to be smarter but less wishy washy, yet it spit out a dissertation of McKinseyesque pros and cons before, you guessed it, not helping.

Gee, Geoff, it may be that using ChatGPT as your digital pet or doctor isn't the weirdest aspect of this phenomenon:

Counterfeit Connections: The Rise of AI Romantic Companions

Really, what could go wrong?  But shall we see what ChatGPT came up with?

Can you see why journalists are so despondent?  That's actually better than the drivel coming from all of the major golf websites.

Sam Burns finished T4 at the BMW and Rickie Fowler finished T7, although both, especially Fowler, are further down the Ryder Cup standings. But if you are captain, how do you balance picking someone higher up on the standings vs. someone with better recent form?

Sens: As a tiebreaker, I’d look further back in the historical record. How have they performed in these kinds of pressure cookers?. Burns went 1 and 2 in Rome and has not generally cut the profile of a killer closer. Fowler has a career 3-9-5 Ryder Cup record. In short, I’d probably look past both of them

Colgan: I think the goal is to pick the twelve best golfers. If No. 11 on your list suddenly can’t break 90, I’d think about recent form. Otherwise, I’d let the last 6 months serve as a much better test.

Piastowski: I’d certainly take a look — but then why have the standings at all? If you’ve bought in this far, no need to switch things up. That said, I’d maybe lean toward the hotter hand with picks 11 and 12 than going with the points system (unless, of course, the hot hand is also 11 or 12). Burns also has the benefit of being close friends with the world No. 1, and you want to keep that man happy.

I'm glad that Nick Piastowski came out and said out loud that Sam Burns' primary qualification for the team is that he's Scottie's buddy, and Nick seems to think that is just hunky dory.

The recent for vs. historical record is a longstanding and valid debate and, like the first two guys, I do think it right to default to taking the better golfer.

But there's a far bigger issue at play here, as in evaluating the importance of "Recent form" I'll focus on the recent bit, as opposed to the form.  The FedEx Cup will conclude on Sunday, August 24th and the Ryder Cup will begin on Friday, September 26th.  What we saw in Rome was that the Euro's played at Wentworth two weeks before the Cup and only one or two U.S. players bothered to peg it, so they showed up in Rome rusty, and it seems our vaunted Ryder Cup Task Force has done nothing about this issue.  We can talk about the U.S. players' form the last we saw them, but we can't pretend that form is "recent" by the time the Cup commences.

Udder Stuff - The TC panel wastes two questions on LIV, about which I don't feel compelled to blog.  But there are a couple of bits from Geoff worth a moment of your time.  First, on the subject of Scottie being good at golf:

The 15 Who Played All 16 Rounds

The Royal Selangor Trophy is annually awarded to the golfer with the lowest total score in the four majors and a nice way of recognizing the players who survived the quadrilateral of cuts.

Here are 2025’s survivors, headlined by Scottie Scheffler and a brilliant 21-stroke win:

• Scottie Scheffler (-32)
• Rory McIlroy (-11)
• Xander Schauffele (-10)
• Jon Rahm (-6)
• Harris English (-5)
• Tyrrell Hatton (-1)
• Matt Fitzpatrick (-1)
• J.J. Spaun (+1)
• Aaron Rai (+3)
• Viktor Hovland (+3)
• Maverick McNealy (+5)
• Sam Burns (+6)
• Daniel Berger (+7)
• Rasmus Hojgaard (+14)
• Brian Harman (+17)

 In case you were wondering:

If you’re wondering whether Scheffler’s dominance was a record in the modern era of the Selanger Trophy and established in 1999? It was not.

Tiger Woods finished 35 strokes better than Ernie Els in 2000.

Jordan Spieth continues to hold the record for most strokes under par with his 54-under-par tally in 2015.

Scheffler’s 32-under par total across the 2025 majors tied for fourth among all-time lowest years, trailing just Spieth in 2015, Woods in 2000, and Koepka’s 36-under-par tally in 2019.

And that's with not really being on form at Augusta do to the kitchen mishap..... How lucky was Rory in that?

Lastly, here's the one LIV-related bit I'll share:

LIV’s Chicago final round event averaged a mere 344,000 viewers airing on Fox last Sunday, while the PGA Tour’s FedEx St. Jude averaged over 3.6 million on NBC, up substantially from 2024’s win by Hideki Matsuyama (2.1 million). (Robopz/X.com)

I'm surprised by the strength of the BMW ratings, but who exactly are these 344,000 people and don't they prefer professional golf?

That's it for today.  I'll catch you later in the week.....