ATLANTA (AP) — The success of a new PGA Tour postseason format depends largely on getting fans to understand what it means. And money is not the answer.
Golf was never meant to have a Super Bowl or a World Series, no matter how hard the tour has tried to make it feel that way over the last 20 years. What matters is a green jacket in April and a silver claret jug in July. Golf has been defined by four majors since Arnold Palmer said so in 1960.
So whether
the new postseason format that CEO Brian Rolapp announced Tuesday — seven days of match play over two weeks in two cities — is an improvement over the previous iterations remains to be seen.
But he delivered the right message with one phrase when Rolapp called it “one of the most difficult tournaments to qualify for and win.”
That's all it is, and that's enough.
The season starts with as many as 20 tournaments against the strongest fields, and the leading 90 players advance to the BMW Championship. The No. 1 player at the end of the week is the season winner ("Champion golfer of the year" is already taken) and handsomely rewarded.
The top 32 advance to the two-week Tour Championship — four players in eight groups (World Cup fever!) and the top two from each group move on to the final week. Then it's single elimination with a twist — everyone has to stick around to the end so there's more than just two players on the course by Sunday.
Odds are the leader in points before the Tour Championship will have played the best golf (lately that has been Scottie Scheffler). And it's just as likely that players who captured one or more of the majors that year would not be losing any sleep if the year didn't end with a FedEx Cup title.
Rory McIlroy is the only three-time winner of the FedEx Cup, and he was never golf's best player any of the years he won. It was Jason Day early and Dustin Johnson late in 2016. It was Brooks Koepka in 2019. And it was Scheffler, whom McIlroy beat by making up a six-shot deficit at East Lake on the final day in 2022.
He was proud of all three titles for different reasons. McIlroy had lost chances to win in 2012 and 2014, so it was important just to have his name on the trophy. It felt big in 2019, too, mainly because the year before he was in the final group when Tiger Woods got swallowed up by the gallery on the 18th hole. That was a cool moment, and then McIlroy got his turn.
“You could argue that each of the FedEx Cups I’ve won I maybe wasn’t the best player of the entire year,” McIlroy said Tuesday. “But I always felt like it was a way to redeem myself or end the year on a really positive note.”
And starting in 2028?
In some respects, it's going back to previous times when there was a Tour Championship winner and a FedEx Cup champion. Those trophies were presented the same day. Now it's two weeks apart.
Dual winners famously happened in 2009 when Woods won the FedEx Cup and Phil Mickelson won the Tour Championship. That prompted Mickelson to say at the trophies presentation: “Let me see if I get this straight. I shot 65 ... and he gets a check for $10 million.”
It was funnier back then.
More awkward was in 2018 when Woods won the Tour Championship, his first victory after five years and four back surgeries. That might be one of the great trivia questions: Who won the FedEx Cup that year? Justin Rose.
And that led to the infamous change to “starting strokes,” which was a lot better than it sounded.
It rewarded the best player through the season — with increased points value in the two playoff events — and he was given a two-shot lead at 10-under par before any shots were hit. It sounded goofy, yes. But it was the same advantage as resetting points based on seeding.
The media lampooned it from Monday to Thursday. No one really talked about it the rest of the week because the leaderboard was clear without doing longhand math on a whiteboard. Then again, the player who took the fewest shots that week could finish second (Xander Schauffele).
And now it should be clear. The best player. A bonus competition for the 32 best players, whittled down over two weeks on two golf courses in match play. The hardest tournament for which to qualify, the toughest to win.
The ultimate measure of success is how it long it lasts before it gets changed.
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