If you follow golf to the extent that you’re a regular consumer of golf media, you’ve probably already read somewhere between five and 300 pieces by people like me with ideas for improving the Tour Championship format. Part of this is because we genuinely want it to be more exciting, both for our own entertainment and because it would be better for our industry if it got huge. The other part is that it’s late August, the majors are over, the Presidents Cup is still a month away and we have no idea what else to write about. If Scottie Scheffler had a heart, he’d go and rob a bank and lead the police on a six-hour car chase to juice up our content machine. Failing that, we can’t resist the siren song of fixing the tour finale.
I’ll make you this promise, though: I’m not reinventing the wheel here. Most of my format has already been conceived by other people, but I’m adding a final twist that I believe would solve the last critical problem. It’s all very basic and sensible, and anybody who thinks I’m wrong should be sent to the nearest gulag. Two key points first:
A. Playoffs are inherently unfair: This is good
I went on a Twitter rant about this on Tuesday – to the core of my being, I hate the argument that playoffs “don’t reward the regular season” enough. First off, it’s not true; even in the current system, performance in the regular season has a huge influence on your position throughout the playoffs. Xander Schauffele could have skipped the first two playoff events to take up line-dancing or knitting, and he’d still have a top spot in the Tour Championship. In the same way that a team sport gives a high seed and home-field advantage to its best regular-season performers in the playoffs, the tour has done a good job protecting the position of the season’s stars.
But folks, I cannot emphasise this enough: that’s all you get.
At some point in a legit postseason, you’ve got to actually win your game or match or tournament. Nobody hands you a Super Bowl because you went 15-1 in the regular season, and they don’t spot you a 28-0 lead to start the game. Again, this is a good thing, because it’s entertaining and fun and unpredictable. Small sample sizes are exciting. If you think regular-season excellence should be the only determining factor in championships, you will love European soccer. But all good Americans know that playoffs are the best, and if tour players don’t like it, tough cookies.
B. If golf is too volatile, give out more money for the regular season and just enough in the playoffs to make it interesting
The only real goal here should be to make the playoffs entertaining, and to get more people to watch. I’m about to advocate for a matchplay finish with 16 players, but I also understand that it would be clinically insane for Scheffler or Schauffele to fall to 16th place over the course of two days of matchplay, which is possible because matchplay golf is weird. This is not a hard problem to solve: adjust the payouts so everyone’s happy, weighting it more to the regular season if necessary. They already pretty much do this! The tour is still a player-run organisation, and they’ve proven adept at throwing money around to keep people happy-ish. They can handle it.
So, here’s my simple idea:
1. Use the first two playoff events, and the first two days of the Tour Championship, to narrow the field down to 16 players. In other words, just keep it the same, except winnow it further from 30 to 16 on Thursday and Friday at East Lake, which would make that arguably the best Thursday and Friday in non-major golf.
2. Take those 16 players, and run a knockout singles matchplay bracket on Saturday and Sunday, with two rounds per day, to determine the champion.
This has all been said before, many times. Here’s the new part:
3. Have all 16 players play all four weekend sessions for placement.
Sorry for the excessive bolding, but to me, this helps solve the best argument against a matchplay finale, which is that it could make for a dismal Sunday afternoon when it’s Tom Hoge and Chris Kirk vying for the title and literally nothing else is on. I get that argument, I truly do, and I get why sponsors would be wary. But with a 16-player bracket, every single one of these guys can keep playing through Sunday afternoon. Say I’m Ludvig Aberg, and I lose my first-round match to Tony Finau. Now I go to the losers bracket with seven other guys, and there I meet Adam Scott and wax him on Saturday afternoon. Now I’m grouped with the three other guys who lost Saturday morning but won Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday morning I beat Sungjae Im. Now it’s just me and one other guy, Bob MacIntyre, who have gone loss-win-win, and we’re matched together in the ninth-place game on Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, the people that have gone loss-loss-loss are playing for 15th place, and those who went win-win-loss are fighting for third, etc.
At every point, it’s worthwhile for these guys to care and keep playing, because there’s more money at stake. And it makes it so that in every “session” on the weekend, you’ve got eight matches going. That makes TV happier! Maybe Rory and Scheffler are meeting up in a sick fifth-place match to mitigate a dull championship, and no matter what, you have wayyyy more action to show.
The tour has tried just about everything except matchplay in the Tour Championship, but now it’s time. And thanks to this final twist, you don’t have to worry about getting stuck with a nightmare final that forces Dan Hicks to talk about his favourite kinds of milk.
I say this with all the conviction of a man writing from his bed: this would work. And if the tour wants to adopt it, I demand nothing in return except for fame and money. And a statue at Ponte Vedra.
