Golf's Football Problem

1) “2014-15” – a single PGA Tour season should not wrap around two years. This isn’t basketball, ice hockey or European soccer: the golf season has a natural rhythm to it, and that rhythm naturally starts when new grass starts to grow toward the beginning of a new year.

 

2) “clinched Player of the Year honors by winning the FedEx Cup” – this seems to have become the accepted narrative, but really, even if you think Spieth hadn’t yet clinched Player of the Year honors simply by turning in one of the three or four best single-season major championship CVs in golfing history, can we at least agree Spieth clinched the award by winning his fifth tournament of the year, not by winning some farcical, actuary’s delight of a playoff system?

 

3) “$10 million bonus prize” – which ad wizard thought it was a good idea to make this garish, sponsor-driven excess the centerpiece of how the PGA Tour ends its season? I mean, the huge end-of-season cash prize of the old Sun City Million Dollar Challenge originally existed to lure big-name golfers to apartheid-era South Africa; is this really the sort of company Tim Finchem wants to keep? The tone-deafness of forcing, or even encouraging, your stars to answer questions about what that much money means to them – or doesn’t mean, in Rory McIlroy’s case – is alarming.

 

4) “Sunday, September 27” – this was the third Sunday of the NFL season. I’m obviously a huge fan of televised golf, and my high school golf team occasionally practiced at East Lake, so I should absolutely be in the target demographic for this event…but sorry, I was watching the Red Zone Channel. I wasn’t alone, either: the 1.9 overnight television rating for NBC’s Sunday telecast was the sixth-lowest final-round rating of any PGA Tour event in 2015. (1.9 was actually 12% better than the equivalent Sunday rating in 2014.)

 

5) “Atlanta” – and if you think the host city was paying more attention to the best golfers in the world than it was to the Falcons’ quest to go 3-0 against the Cowboys on Sunday, or even the Bulldogs’ warm-up game on Saturday ahead of their big SEC clash with the Crimson Tide, you’re out of your mind.

 

Each of these issues with the current conclusion of the PGA Tour season is problematic, but they are all consequences of the large shadow cast by American football. Ever since the Skins Game faded into irrelevance, there has been only one golf event – the Ryder Cup – capable of attracting any casual fans in America during NFL season. The President’s Cup currently teeters between irrelevance and collapse, and particularly with Tiger Woods back in the treatment room, the start of the 2015-16 season in mid-October will be greeted with utter indifference. The FedEx Cup and wraparound schedule were the Tour’s attempt to mitigate these issues, but they seem to have created more problems than they solved.

 

When the Tour Championship was created in 1987, the end-of-year PGA Tour schedule made much more sense to me. After the PGA Championship ended on August 9, several other high-profile tournaments – The International (modified stableford at Castle Pines), the Western Open (at Butler National) and the World Series of Golf (at Firestone) – immediately followed. September and October were filled with the usual undercard of minor events, but then the Tour Championship from October 28 to November 1 served as a decisive punctuation mark with which to end a gentle run-on sentence.

 

The NFL wasn’t the same behemoth in 1987 it has since become, but the logic of that year’s Tour calendar ought to make even more sense now. Even if the FedEx Cup format were intelligible to normal, sentient beings, it would still pose a massive scheduling problem: this year it forced the Tour’s best 30 golfers to play four times in five weeks, and at least six times in eight weeks if you include the PGA Championship and WGC-Bridgestone before the “playoffs” begin. That fixture congestion will only get worse in 2016: in addition to the Ryder Cup, three major prizes on three different continents (Claret Jug, Wannamaker Trophy and Olympic gold medal) will all be awarded in a 28-day span, and one playoff event (the BMW at Crooked Stick) will start only three days after another (the Deutsche Bank at TPC Boston) ends on Labor Day. This is not a recipe for quality golf; why else do you think Spieth missed consecutive cuts and looked generally lost at this year’s first two playoff events?

 

The way forward ought to involve going backward and recognizing how absence makes the heart grow fonder. I rather liked how the early Tour Championships seemed to pop up out of nowhere, offering meaningful golf played by real stars at a time when you didn’t really expect it. So if we must have a season-ending playoff system, why not space the events out every three or four weeks before culminating in November? That would give more room for the Ryder Cup to breathe, more rest to the top-tier players being burned out by the current system, and more relevance to second-tier tournaments which could now be used for playoffs preparation. Autumn golf will always play second fiddle to the NFL’s Jascha Heifetz, but the Tour can certainly do a better job of sounding less off-key.