Golfpocalypse is a weekly collection of words about (mostly) professional golf with very little in the way of a point, and the Surgeon General says it will make you a worse person. Reach out to The Golfpocalypse with your questions or comments on absolutely anything at shane.spr8@gmail.com.
If you follow golf to the extent that you're a regular consumer of golf media, you've probably already read somewhere between five and 300 pieces by people like me with ideas for improving the Tour Championship format. Part of this is because we genuinely want it to be more exciting, both for our own entertainment and because it would be better for our industry if it got huge. The other part is that it's late August, the majors are over, the Presidents Cup is still a month away and we have no idea what else to write about. If Scottie Scheffler had a heart, he'd go rob a bank and lead the police on a six-hour car chase to juice up our content machine. Failing that, we can't resist the siren song of fixing the tour finale.
I'll make you this promise, though: I'm not reinventing the wheel here. Most of my format has already been conceived by other people, but I'm adding a final twist that I believe would solve the last critical problem. It's all very basic and sensible, and anybody who thinks I'm wrong should be sent to the nearest gulag. Two key points first:
A. Playoffs are inherently unfair: This is good
I went on a Twitter rant about this on Tuesday—to the core of my being, I hate the argument that playoffs "don't reward the regular season" enough. First off, it's not true; even in the current system, performance in the regular season has a massive influence on your position throughout the playoffs. Xander Schauffele could have skipped the first two playoff events to take up line dancing or knitting, and he'd still have a top spot in the Tour Championship. In the same way that a team sport gives a high seed and home-field advantage to its best regular-season performers in the playoffs, the tour has done a good job protecting the position of the season's stars.
But folks, I cannot emphasize this enough: That's all you get.
At some point in a legit postseason, you've got to actually win your game or match or tournament. Nobody hands you a Super Bowl because you went 15-1 in the regular season, and they don't spot you a 28-0 lead to start the game. Again, this is a good thing, because it's entertaining and fun and unpredictable. Small sample sizes are exciting. If you think regular-season excellence should be the only determining factor in championships, you will love European soccer. But all good Americans know that playoffs are the best, and if tour players don't like it, tough cookies.
B. If golf is too volatile, give out more money for the regular season and just enough in the playoffs to make it interesting
The only real goal here should be to make the playoffs entertaining, and to get more people to watch. I'm about to advocate for a match-play finish with 16 players, but I also understand that it would be clinically insane for Scheffler or Schauffele to fall to 16th place over the course of two days of match play, which is possible because match-play golf is weird. This is not a hard problem to solve: Adjust the payouts so everyone's happy, weighting it more to the regular season if necessary. They already pretty much do this! The tour is still a player-run organization, and they've proven adept at throwing money around to keep people happy-ish. They can handle it.
So, here's my simple idea:
1. Use the first two playoff events, and the first two days of the Tour Championship, to narrow the field down to 16 players. In other words, just keep it the same, except winnow it further from 30 to 16 on Thursday and Friday at East Lake, which would make that arguably the best Thursday and Friday in non-major golf.
2. Take those 16 players, and run a knockout singles match-play bracket on Saturday and Sunday, with two rounds per day, to determine the champion.
This has all been said before, many times. Here's the new part:
3. Have all 16 players play all four weekend sessions for placement.
Sorry for the excessive bolding, but to me, this helps solve the best argument against a match-play finale, which is that it could make for a dismal Sunday afternoon when it's Tom Hoge and Chris Kirk vying for the title and literally nothing else is on. I get that argument, I truly do, and I get why sponsors would be wary. But with a 16-player bracket, every single one of these guys can keep playing through Sunday afternoon. Say I'm Ludvig Aberg, and I lose my first-round match to Tony Finau. Now I go to the losers bracket with seven other guys, and there I meet Adam Scott and wax him Saturday afternoon. Now I'm grouped with the three other guys who lost Saturday morning but won Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday morning I beat Sungjae Im. Now it's just me and one other guy, Bob MacIntyre, who have gone loss-win-win, and we're matched together in the ninth-place game on Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, the people that have gone loss-loss-loss are playing for 15th place, and those who went win-win-loss are fighting for third, and etc.
At every point, it's worthwhile for these guys to care and keep playing, because there's more money at stake. And it makes it so that in every "session" on the weekend, you've got eight matches going. That makes TV happier! Maybe Rory and Scheffler are meeting up in a sick fifth-place match to mitigate a dull championship, and no matter what, you have wayyyy more action to show.
The tour has tried just about everything except match play in the Tour Championship, but now it's time. And thanks to this final twist, you don't have to worry about getting stuck with a nightmare final that forces Dan Hicks to talk about his favorite kinds of milk.
I say this with all the conviction of a man writing from his bed: This would work. And if the tour wants to adopt it, I demand nothing in return except for fame and money. And a statue at Ponte Vedra.
FIVE TOUR THOUGHTS, BMW CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION
Harry How
1. I've said this before, and I'll say it again: the Keegan Bradley Ryder Cup captain decision may end up being a very good one, but it's also a very chaotic and confusing one. And anything that adds to the chaos, such as him starting to play incredible golf and perhaps making the team, is something I'm going to love. Embrace the madness! Needless to say, I loved the fact that he won the BMW.
2. Ludvig Aberg keeps coming incredibly close to winning, but still just has that 2023 RSM Classic on his PGA Tour resume, along with one European win. Meanwhile, he's fifth on the FedEx Cup rankings, which shows just how consistently great he's been. My very lukewarm take is that he's on the Scheffler trajectory, and the minute he wins something big, he's not going to stop winning.
3. I have to give props to Justin Thomas for making the Tour Championship by the skin of his teeth, because it seems like he has done absolutely nothing of note this year. This is a classic example of how you don't need to really light the world on fire to make the Tour Championship, you just can't get cold. Thomas has five top tens, hasn't finished better than fifth, and he's missed four cuts, but he did just enough to sneak in ... all while players who have won an actual tournament are out.
4. I know objectively this is not true, but sometimes it seems like professional golfers never crash and burn permanently. Even if they hit a mini-slump, it'll only be two years before they're in the final pairing Sunday at a major. This thought is inspired by Shane Lowry, because I cannot believe he's elite again. He had fully reached Team Europe mascot status in my head, just a fun team guy who may as well have been 53 years old, and how he's in the Tour Championship and contending everywhere.
5. Is it me, or does the Presidents Cup International team look kinda good? If nothing else, it feels like they're peaking, and Weir just needs to get some output from the Canadians he picks to have a pretty strong squad. In team match play season, you really gotta fear the late peak.
THE ABSOLUTE IRONCLAD LOCKS OF THE WEEK
The Golfpocalypse is not a gambling advice service, and you should never heed anything written here. Better picks are here.
Record through 4 weeks: 1-21. But we came close to nailing it with K.J. Choi at the Ally Challenge. Many people are saying how close we're getting.
I absolutely love Scottie Scheffler at the Tour Championship, and you better believe I'm only recognizing the imbalanced leaderboard where he starts ahead of everyone else. I do not care who wins the fake "everyone starts at the same score" 72-hole event. We need a win.
At the FM Championship on the LPGA Tour, I think we were just a week too early last time on Atthaya Thitikul. The muse came ahead of schedule, but I'm sticking with her.
At the DP World Tour's British Masters, we'll honor our colonial overlords and pick the angry king Matt Wallace. I love a Briton who bucks the buttoned-up stereotype and is just flat out pissed whenever he wants to be.
In LIV Golf Medellín, I like Anthony Kim.
THE "DUMB TAKE I KIND OF BELIEVE"
If you WD from a playoff series event, you should be out of the entire playoffs for the year. You can't forfeit in the semifinals and still make the championship! Hideki Matsuyama and Bob MacIntyre both called it quits at the BMW, but now both are playing in East Lake because they stayed inside the top 30. Shouldn't happen! KICK 'EM OUT, JAY!
THE READER STORY OF THE WEEK
Here's Eddie with another "random playing partner" story that will trigger all good people:
My usual playing partner (an older gentleman whose game is elite) and I thought good vibes all around were in store for us as we pulled into the parking lot, but that’s only because we had no idea who was waiting for us on the first tee. Little did we know that in less than 30 minutes we were about to meet Keegan, the worst random partner we’ve ever been paired with at a course...
...my playing partner and I don’t ever return to the golf cart before the other golfers in our group have finished the hole as well, but everything we knew about a round of golf went out the window on Hole No. 1. The two of us carded pars and stood off the green waiting and watching to see if Keegan may pick up after nine or ten strokes, but he was adamant he needed to card 14. I have never had the group behind us get mad this quickly, and I’ve also never witnessed the obscenities shouted our way on the first hole. In that moment, I wanted so badly to hold up a giant sign that reads: HE’S NOT WITH US...
...On about the fourth hole, I noticed something that still to this day haunts me. Keegan would park his cart a good 15-20 yards before his golf ball, get out and grab his club, walk to his ball, hit it, and then walk the 15-20 yards back to his cart. After a few more holes of this, we were not only dumbfounded but we simply could not stomach it any longer, especially when he grabbed the wrong club and had to make the walk twice. My playing partner assured him that he’s allowed to park his cart right next to his ball, but Keegan in his first round of golf ever with random strangers had an answer for everything. “No, I knew I could park my golf cart right next to my ball if I wanted to, but I like the walk from the cart to my ball. Those fifteen yards give me a chance to prepare my mind for every shot I’ll take.”
Honestly, the cart thing is so bad that not only should this Keegan go to jail, but Keegan Bradley should also be punished just for having the same name.
Previously on Golfpocalypse:
It cannot be fun to play golf when you're egregiously bad...it just can;t
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