Why I (Sort of) Like the FedExCup

The promise of the FedExCup may not exactly be delivered overnight, but that’s no reason to throw in the towel on a good idea.

Thrash TalkI’ll bet you that when it comes to the subject of the FedExCup, there have probably been at least 25 negative commentaries in print, on the Web, and on TV for every one positive one. And that might be understating it.

Whenever I see something like this happening, my contrarian gland starts pumping skeptic hormone through my bloodstream, usually resulting in a string of maniacal rants against popular opinion. So far this season, however, I’ve been pretty measured in my comments to friends, on blogs, etc., on this matter, afraid of being branded an idiot for supporting what has been, until two weeks ago, little more than a cheesy marketing blitz.

And while I have my reservations on the matter, I’m ready to come out of the closet. The FedExCup is a good thing, with the potential to be much more.

Why, specifically, have I been afraid to support the FedExCup (let’s call it the “FEC” for short)? Well, there have been many well-conceived, negative critiques of the thing, many by people for whom I have great respect. You probably know the criticisms. They include:

  1. The point system is too complicated.
  2. The point system doesn’t reward the right things.
  3. Nobody will watch a phony golf playoff over college and pro football.
  4. It’s just a big cash grab by the PGA Tour.
  5. It is unfair to the tournaments it supplanted.
  6. The players don’t even care about it, so why should the fans?

There is some truth to all of these, and there is no doubt that the FEC, in its current form, is far from perfect. If it is to succeed at all long term, there will have to be changes. But to be honest, I’m not really interested in the specifics of it. I’m willing to set all of these matters aside as fixable issues or mere distractions that someone smarter than me can fix. What I’m interested in, my “issue,” is the general subject of a season-ending playoff series for professional golf.

FedExCup LogoMany people are skeptical of this – it’s probably the root of all of the objections to the FEC. I think it’s a compelling idea.

One of the great mysteries of athletics is the subject of hot streaks and slumps. Even at the highest levels, where athletes often practice and prepare in a manner nothing short of obsessive-compulsive, one’s level of athletic performance ebbs and flows over time, for reasons that are generally unknown to the athlete in question. Any golfer knows this. You have shot two or three shots below your handicap four rounds in a row, are on pace to break your personal scoring record for a round, and the next thing you know you forget how to swing and begin hitting it sideways.

In team sports, especially those with long seasons like baseball, basketball, and hockey, the peaks and valleys vary from player to player across the long season, generally smoothing them out, such that generally by the end of the year, you have a pretty good idea of the best and worst teams in the league. Playoff systems, especially those which invite more teams, can skew things a bit at times by giving us unlikely champions, but in general there is validity to the results.

This hasn’t really been true in golf. Without “teammates” to pick them up, PGA Tour pros’ streaks and slumps have profound effects on how their results for the season are viewed and rated, and often the golfers who play the best and most consistently for a season do not win the prestigious championships. It’s all a matter of timing. Of course, many point to this aspect of the game as one of its charms, and players like Hogan, Nicklaus, and Woods have created an entire philosophy/religion on the subject of preparing for the big tournaments. But the fact that there are big tournaments doesn’t mean the remaining events are trivial, or that one’s performance in them counts for nothing.

A playoff system for golf addresses this issue. By rewarding play throughout the season and in the season ending championship series, something like the FEC gives the golfer a chance to demonstrate consistent, season long proficiency, as well as pressure performance, in a way that the single tournament major championships do not.

Up until now, there has been no such examination for golfers.

I think the early returns on the FEC series are showing us its potential for excitement. Tiger and Phil battling it out in Boston last weekend was about the best golf can offer today (outside of it occuring in a major), and the notion that it will all be over in just two short weeks (as opposed to waiting a month for the next major) is exciting for golf fans. Granted, the validity of this year’s championship is no doubt tarnished by the absence of many of the stars in the four Cup events (as I said, I know it’s far from perfect), but the potential for something special and unique for golf is there.

Sports fans are often traditionalists, loving the games they grew up with, and not exactly anxious to see things change. There’s virtue in this, to be sure, but the most successful sports change and grow.

I think there’s room in golf for the FEC. It compliments the majors, rather than competing with them. It’s the golf season’s mulligan. If you get unlucky and lose to Larry Mize on a chip in at the Masters, or run into Scott Hamilton or Jack Fleck on the week of their lives, or if you bounce a ball off a one-inch metal railing into the hay at the British, you still have a chance to win something big for the year. It’s at the end of a long year, therefore rewarding the player with physical and mental stamina.

The Tour may have to paint over the canvas in a few places to get it just right, but the FEC can definitely work. It can’t succeed without the support of the players, which has been iffy thus far. But weighed on its merits and potential, I think it’s way too early to begin writing the obituary.

16 thoughts on “Why I (Sort of) Like the FedExCup”

  1. I think a lot of the problems people have with it could be solved if they simply renamed it the “FedExCup Series” rather than “playoffs.” Golf can’t really have a true “playoff” system outside of match play or a really long (i.e. 288 holes?) stroke-play event.

    I think giving the players the option to put the $10M in the bank (the annuity) or to take it on the spot would be interesting as well.

  2. It seems that there are just too many players in the playoffs. It would be more exciting to see the top 25 or even less. What do you guys think?

  3. I too want to like the FEC. They’ve just rolled it out a little half-baked. I hope it will get better. This past weekend was pretty darn good. It only could have been better if they’d both been firing on all cylinders coming down the stretch (Tiger’s putting was off, and Phil was leaking a little oil).

    I do like the idea of calling it a “series.” That, after all, is what it really is.

  4. This past weekend was pretty darn good.

    Aside from Phil feeling an obligation to play an event he doesn’t normally play, though, almost nothing about the past weekend had to do with the FedExCup. Put Phil and Tiger in the same pairing and near the lead on Sunday (or Monday) in any tournament and it’ll be compelling, you know?

  5. I concur with George P. in that I do want to like the FEC. I thought last weekend was good – Tiger vs. Phil. The reality of last week was that Wetterich and Obberholser had a chance but noboby cared to watch. It felt like “the other guys” were just an add on to what people really wanted to see. The FEC has to find a way to avoid that situation. If Tiger isn’t in contention and Phil’s at home with the family, are people really going to care if Verplank takes on Mayfair? Probably not. Making golf more interesting for TV goes beyond just the FEC. Golf has a lot of really cool personalities but it also has a lot of gomers – Rory, Vijay, Verplank, etc. People simply don’t want to watch these un-emotional rubes.

  6. I recognize that the main purpose of the FEC is to keep people interested in the last several weeks of the golf season when (admit it) we’re all watching football. And I also recognize that the Tour needs to make sure most of the best players are willing to play in it for that to happen. Like most others who have commented, the FEC is slowly growing on me, but I still need to see a couple things change before I can say this is going to be anything more than a short-lived novelty.

    The main problem with the FEC (IMHO) is that it lacks a true identity — I don’t understand what it’s trying to be. Is it a way to identify the year’s best player, most consistent player, best over the last 4 weeks of the season, or something else? Golf already has a variety of ways to identify the best player over the course of the season — money list, most wins, most majors, scoring average, average finish, player of the year (pick one). And it doesn’t make it sound any less like a big money grab at the end of the season when players suggest that getting $10 million dollars in 10-15 years just isn’t enough of an incentive to play.

    What would make the FEC more interesting to me?

    1. Give everyone who makes the field a mathematically equal chance of winning. Use season points to determine who makes the playoff but then get rid of them for the actual playoff. It rewards both the week-in-week out grinders the players who have the luxury of being able to take weeks off. And, over the course of several weeks, even starting from the same spot, the best players will rise to the top.

    2. Shorten the FEC playoffs from 4 to 3 weeks. If the better players can’t/won’t play four weeks in a row, either shorten it, build in an off week (particularly with this quirky Monday finish over Labor Day), or make the first event a mandatory “play-in” event for players 37-144 (to cut them down to 36) with players 1-36 having the option of playing or not (kind of like a first round bye).

    3. As for some more radical alternatives (which I havent fully thought through), how about seeding the players from top to bottom and running it like a playoff using stroke-play totals (rather than match play) to figure out who wins each match-up? or having players carry over their scores from the previous week? or cutting the field down to an even smaller number for the Tour Championship, so there is more fo sense that the players are really playing against each other for the final prize?

    Anyway, I don’t think the FEC is as bad as feared, but without some changes to the format, I think it is destined to be nothing more than late season version of the “West Coast Swing” (except there, the player actually gets the bonus money).

  7. The point system is hard to understand, but at least it is less complicated than the World Golf Rankings. Except for Tiger at the top who can figure that out? I do think there is something wrong when the definition of competition is challenged. When a player does not lose points or very little in ranking when he does not play, is hard for people to really grab a hold of. The worst Phil can be is 5th overall after this weekend the way I understand it, and he won’t even be in the same state! Some other respondent said it should be called a “series” or maybe a “Golf Jamboree” or “Fed Ex Golf Super Slam” i.e the WWF. Does anybody know who won the last “Super Slam?” Does anybody care? In any case, the operative word in “playoffs” is PLAY! In any other sport how can you advance in the “playoffs” if you don’t play?

  8. I can appreciate all of the pros mentioned in the article, but I feel like I’m three and being force-fed peas. I like what it’s done for a build up to the Tour Championship but seems really fake. The drama is fun to watch but let’s face it golf’s about the majors. When it comes down to it in my foursome, we make sure we are done playing in time to watch the Majors in the grill. I’m not changing a tee time for the FedExCup.

  9. Golf must decide what they want: Do they want baseball of the old era, where the thing that determined the league champ was the pennant race, and that the WS was the only Championship event? Or do they want modern baseball, where a team can have the 4th best record in the league, get hot, and be the “world champion.”

    I’m not sure which I want, but I lean toward the thing favoring consistent performance throughout the year.

    There are good arguments for both options.

  10. I think the FEC can be a good thing in years to come, they will refine I believe and find more exciting ways to position the playoff series.

    Phill Mickleson I believe has pulled out to prove a point to Tim Finchen and its a point well made, the fact is the US Tour is the strongest and could be a much better tour if it worked with the top players eg. Els, Cambell, Mickleson, Goosen etc, instead of putting restrictions on when and where they can play, these guys have all the money they could hope for another 10 mil aint gonna make them play more if they don’t want to or play on their home tour and that should be fine. The result of being more leanient on these guys would be a much better player tour relationship where you could more likely ask some of the top players to support some weaker events and may find they would.

    Lets give the FEC time to find its feet, after all its still good golf we are watching.

  11. If there is one thing I have learned since starting to visit “The SandTrap” is that the writers generally key in on what is “bad” 👿 about golf.

    Even the domain contains a negative connotation and its as if other golf course landing points such as “The Tee Box”, “The Fairway” and “The Putting Green” were discounted due to their being “good”.

    With that being said, my principal disappointment with last weeks golf centered along having it finish on Monday and with the aggravating inability to find a !@#$%^& ❗ network to show the event!

    I admit to being in Tigers Army but I will watch any tournament regardless of who is leading. Therefore, I have no passion for how much money they make or how many events they play in. Instead, I like to enjoy shot making and I like to pull for the underdog since I consider myself to belong to that group which makes up 99.99% of all golfers. 🙄

    Finally, I would like to express my gratitude that sites like this exist in order to promote golf and also mention that I really like inserting these smilleys into my posts 😈

  12. 10 million is an amazing amount of money. Funny thing is, you’re going to have someone winning next week, yep, well done, but the real winner is Tiger! who finished fourth today. Well done Tiger, here’s 10 million which dwarfs the winner’s check for this tournament, but you won two of the other tournaments so while you didn’t win today, you um… won.

    If people in the US watch American Football over golf, then too bad golf. Put the PGA back a month if you want to add some weight to the end of the season. It’s silly having it so close to the British Open anyway.

  13. Do you think Luke Donald, Jerry Kelly, David Toms and Henrik Stenson are watching the Tour Championship? They are in the top 30 on the money list, but left out due to the FedEx cup points system.

    Luke Donald is 25th on the money list with almost .5 million more that Camillo Vellegas who is at 37th on the money list.

    So far the tournaments have been great, but they would have been great without calling them the “playoffs”.

  14. It got me watching tournaments that I would generally not watch. Saturday’s play was amazing with lots of players to cheer for. I think that any playoff, that can be won by a guy that skips the first tournament, has an entirely flawed points system though.

    If you skip one, it should be all over.

    The payouts though? That’s just stupid. The one thing that Tiger has brought to golf is the quest for perfection, and an exponential increase in the number of hoopleheads on public courses. Now toss in the insane payouts and, like every other sport, you totally wreck it.

    Anyway, I digress.

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