FedExCup/Tour Championship- Keep Current Format or Change it?

1.  Do you like the Tournament within a Tournament format?

Sneds (and Bill Haas last year) won both but had you flip flopped Rose and Sneds, you would have seen 2 "winners" (like when Phil won the TC and Tiger took the FEC in 2009)  Should the TC/FEC be merged and structured in a way that there is only one result?

2.  Do you like the reset points system, or do you think a strokes reset (or something else) might be better? i.e.  something like #1 going into the TC starts .5 shots ahead of #2, 1 shot ahead of #3, 1.5 shots ahead of #4, etc.  Do you like the complicated points scenarios or would you prefer something that everyone can easily understand.  This could be done in a way where you still have the tourny within a tourny or as a single result event.

I am not sure if it would work for the gallery, but a bowling type format might be interesting.  i.e. The #30 seed plays against the #29 seed and the winner advances to play the #28 seed, etc.  Maybe start with something like 3 hole matches (plus sudden death) and end with a 9 hole match involving the #1 seed against whoever has made it all the way through.  I think this is an exciting format, but it only has 2 golfers competing at once which might not work for galleries.  Several potential solutions to that problem include having the next players up playing as well and/or having a separate event (Pro-Am?) involving the players who have been knocked out.

Don't know if the current format is the best, but it seems to work out okay.

I'll start with the assumption that the points leader before the re-set has to have an advantage.  It would be patently unfair if Rory McIlroy, top-3 in the points going into the playoffs, and winner of 2 playoff events, didn't have an advantage in points going into the TC over Ryan Moore, who didn't win this year, and barely skated his way into the field with top-10s in the two playoff events that Rory won.

So, how do you weight that advantage?  What if numbers 6-30 played a 36-hole qualifier, and the top-9 finishers play into a seeded bracket.  Rory and Tiger (#1 & #2 going into the TC) get a bye the first round, and then it's single elimination from there (so after the first round of matches, you end up with an 8-man seeded bracket.  36-hole qualifier on Wednesday, 18-hole bye-round matches on Thursday, round of 8 on Friday, round of 4 on Saturday, and then 36-hole Championship (and consolation) match on Sunday.

Match play is the only way you can weight the advantage and set up a format where the TC winner automatically wins the FedEx Cup.

I've said this before, but I think the current format is fine. There are outcomes that are a little surprising, but as you've said, if you want a real playoff tournament, then you just have to go with a head to head bracket. That works for a lot of sports, but it's simply not viable for golf.

Remember, the goal of the Cup isn't just to crown a winner, the goal is to engage the audience for a series of events at the end of the season (probably to sell advertising, but I'm not going THAT deep here). To do that, you need the big names to show up every week. You can't do a match play event just because the last rounds are awful as a telecast with 15 seconds of action every few minutes. If you want to fill the airtime, you'd have to have a bunch of non-winners playing matches that the audience simply doesn't care about.

A winner-takes-all stroke play event, where you are required to qualify in a manner similar to the current system would be workable. I'm not sure it's an improvement, though. I think the idea of the FEC being about more than just winning a single event is a feature, not a bug. The complexity adds drama---it gives players who did poorly in the earlier events a big hurdle, setting up the come-from-behind kind of possibilities that exist in other sports to a much greater degree. The Snedeker "upset" of McIlroy (and others) is a lot more interesting than if they all qualified on equal footing, and then he happened to win the final round.

So I'd say keep it as-is.

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I don't think this is an entirely justified assumption, but I do think it's a reasonable constraint to add. It is a choice of flavor and tone, and I think it makes the FEC "bigger," but the two teams in the Superbowl are on equal footing that day, whether they skated in with blowout victories or eked out wins from a wildcard through the playoffs.

The one thing I know is that using match play to determine a champion of a league made up almost entirely of stroke play events would be like using the shoot out to decide the winner of the Stanley Cup. I don't care for it in any form. If they want it to be a match play playoffs then they need to have match play events determine the ranking system.

The current format seems to work pretty well. The FEC is becoming my favorite. I love watching  the majors but think the FEC is more compelling.  Watching golfers in the last regular season tournament of the year fight so hard just to get into the playoffs makes for great TV.  Then each playoff tournament has them fighting to get the next level.  You can see golfers under pressure from the top of the leader board all the way down to the bottom whereas in all other events the pressure during the weekend rounds is only on those in contention for the win.

Winning the FEC is the most challenging event on tour in my opinion.

I agree with Lefty (and others) regarding the drama/complexities of the final regular season event and the first 3 playoff events, but am not 100% convinced that I like the complex scenarios and double winner potential of the TC.  Had Rose or Moore won with Sneds 2nd and Rory 5th, would you have liked the idea of Sneds still taking the cup?

I agree with K-troop that the higher seeds/ranks should be given an advantage, but there are ways to do this in a stroke play format and still come up with a single winner.  I think match play is an acceptable format even if most events are stroke play.  I agree that there may be audience issues, but think the TV guys can come up with a way to make it interesting (such as condensing some of the earlier matches in the first part of the coverage and catching up to the live stuff towards the end of the coverage.

No/Yes.  You can still give the higher ranked players coming out of the 3rd playoff event an advantage over the lower ranked players while having the TC results=Final FEC results.  i.e. instead of saying that Rory is 900 points ahead of Sneds you say he is 2 to 4 shots ahead of Sneds at the TC before they tee off Thursday.

I'm not too bothered either way about how they resolve the FedEx, but this sort of argument does annoy me.

It really isn't THAT complicated.

They have a certain amount of points after the reset; they will gain a certain amount of points for the TC; the sum of those two things decides the winner.

Well, some people would say it adds to the drama and TV entertainment value.  I am very good with numbers and easily understand the explanations and scenarios.  BUT, this is what is going to happen some year in the future- the two top fed ex cup contenders (call them A & B) are going to be sitting in the clubhouse with a group or two left on the course with A winning the cup if a certain player plays well (or poorly) and B winning the cup if another guy steps up (or blows up).  It might make for good TV drama, but I am not certain if that is how the top prize in golf should be decided??

I like this kind of finish. I'm in agreement with Tiger's thinking  that someone could win all year long and NOT be the champion of the "year". That's nuts.

Yeah, but that's no different from a football team that wins every game except the Superbowl. They still don't get the ring.

??????

The Tour Championship is a tournament.

The FedEx Cup is not a tournament.

There is no such thing as a champion of the year - so the question doesn't even get raised.

I thought Ernie Els was The Champion Golfer of the Year for 2012.

No, he's The British Champion Golfer.

Exactly, this is why I don't mind the current system.  If it were based on regular season/playoff wins the Patriots would be the 2008 Superbowl Champions.  But they're not; they were beaten by the better team that day.  I don't mind that once a year the PGA wants to have their version of the Superbowl.

LOL

What if the points were adjusted at the START of the playoffs?  I dunno how it would affect the lower guys but I think it would make the eventual champion a more true champion(not that they already don't deserve the win if they do so under the current format)