Brandel Chamblee reignited this old Tiger Woods–Sam Snead debate (and, of course, he’s right)

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[PHOTO: Chung Sung-Jun]

Leave it to Brandel Chamblee to reignite an old Tiger Woods debate during a weekend in which Woods didn’t play. The Golf Channel analyst has a real knack for stirring the pot. But once (wrongfully) labelled a “Tiger hater”, Chamblee is anything but. And once again he took Tiger’s side in this particular argument.

OK, so how did we get to opening up an old Woods debate from what happened at the Zurich Classic? Well, Rory McIlroy co-won the team event with Shane Lowry and was given credit for his 25th career PGA Tour title, moving him out of a tie with Gary Player and Dustin Johnson on the all-time list. Interesting bookkeeping to say the least.

Actually, it wasn’t Chamblee who technically (re)started it, but rather Gary Williams, another golf analyst, who tweeted this:

And Tiger probably would give Rory some sledging over that. Especially because none of his 82 career PGA Tour titles are of the team variety.

Anyway, in swooped Chamblee to add to the argument and get Golf Twitter buzzing:

And you know what? He’s right. (For the record, Williams agreed with Chamblee in the thread.)

A few years ago, we took a deeper look into the topic of most PGA Tour wins, a record Woods officially shares with Sam Snead. But as Chamblee points out, Woods has zero team wins among his 82 while five of Snead’s count. This despite the fact that Woods won the 2000 World Cup with David Duval. Why doesn’t that count? Including that alone would give Woods 83.

And there are a lot of other reasons that Woods should have the record to himself. Go read the article! But if you don’t want to, just know that if Woods’ professional wins were counted in the same fashion as Snead’s are, he’d be sitting on 95(!) wins now instead of 82.

In other words, there would be no debate for Brandel – or anyone else – to bring up. But what would be the fun in that?