Scottie Scheffler has been the best golfer on the planet nevermind the PGA Tour this year so it seems mightily unfair on him that Akshay Bhatia, ranked 30th in the FedEx Cup standings, could win the season long race with a win this week.
The format for this week’s Tour Championship has been changed from starting strokes to a completely level playing field where all thirty players start on the same score.
Under normal circumstances, this seems fair enough. Why should the 30th ranked player have to start ten shots behind the number one ranked player? You have essentially no chance of winning.
Add to that the caveat of having to give Scottie Scheffler a head start! Boy, it’s a good thing the starting strokes are gone for this year.
But then it doesn’t seem fair to Scheffler that he gets no reward in the last playoff event of the year for topping the standings throughout the season.
The Tour Championship is golf’s Rubik’s Cube. Everyone thinks they know how to solve it, but they really don’t.
The Tour Championship this week literally is anybody’s. Whether you are 1 or 30 you have the same chance as everybody else. That’s why Rory McIlroy could skip the first of the three FedEx Cup Playoff events. With no starting strokes in the Tour Championship and no jeopardy between being 1st or 30th in the standings, it made no difference whether he played or not.
A matchplay format was put forward for the Tour Championship but given that the WGC Matchplay event has been off the schedule for a couple of seasons now, that was never going to pass.
McIlroy added: “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.”
But having some form of matchplay could work. I present to you the formats for the West of Ireland and South of Ireland Amateur Championships.
Thirty players is a nice number as well. Not too big, not too small, the tournament will flow quickly and still be good for TV audiences.
And there will be jeopardy from the outset.
Thirty players enter into 36 holes of stroke play over the first two days. The top-4 players qualify automatically into the quarter finals while the remaining eight players will go into the first round of matchplay on Saturday.
The four winners from round one of the matchplay will play the four quarter finalists on Saturday afternoon.
Your Sunday viewing will include two semi-finals and a final to decide the Tour champion and FedEx Cup champion.
This as a base format would give you a lot of wriggle room for change over the coming years. You could increase the number of stroke play qualifiers. Take away the byes for the top-4 players and even bring stroke play back for the final four players who come through the matchplay stages.
The FedEx Cup race is the perfect meritocracy over the regular season.
Over on this side of the Atlantic, the DP World Tour rewards its PGA Tour based players far too easily.
McIlroy leads the Race to Dubai despite having played just six times, one of those events being the Masters.
In second is Marco Penge who has won twice and played three times as many events as McIlroy yet trails him by almost 1000 points.
Of McIlroy’s six Race to Dubai ranking events. Four are major championships and the other two are Rolex Events in Dubai and Scotland. His first regular event will be the Amgen Irish Open next month.
Meanwhile, Tyrrell Hatton has played just five times and was as high as second before last week. He is fifth now.
In fairness to McIlroy he is taking on a global schedule after the Tour Championship including Kildare, Wentworth, India, the UAE and Australia. But the Race to Dubai has lost its gravitas.
There was a time, of course, when topping what was once grandly called the “Order of Merit” on the European Tour was a huge deal. Just ask 2006 winner Pádraig Harrington.
But McIlroy has now levelled Seve Ballesteros’ record of six Race to Dubai titles thanks to three wins in a row despite playing 10, 10 and 12 events. Collin Morikawa, the 2021 champion, played ten times to win.
But the DP World Tour is hamstrung by its strategic alliance deal with the PGA Tour. In fact, it started before then with the sort of redundant Rolex Series events – status which the Irish Open has lost to little harm.
These big money bonus points events were there to suit the big name Europeans coming over from the PGA Tour for a handful of outings so they could rack up enough points to keep them near the top of the rankings until the next Rolex event.
The Race to Dubai is an afterthought, a shrug of the shoulders. Its gradual decline in relevance mirrors the DP World Tour.
The PGA Tour gives no reward for the best players while the DP World Tour makes it too easy for their best players.
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