Romine: It’s time for PGA Tour to get rid of its Net Tour Championship

The PGA Tour has a playoff problem.

If the Tour wants people to take its FedExCup finals more seriously, then it needs to get rid of its Net Tour Championship.

It’s not a novel idea, but I started writing this on Saturday afternoon. Week 1 of college football was underway and Scottie Scheffler was honing his own pay-per-view game. Scheffler finished Saturday’s third round five strokes ahead of Collin Morikawa, and an impressive 26 under par after 54 holes at the newly redesigned East Lake (Or was it renovated? Was it restored?). Sources say the $25 million may have already been pending in Scheffler’s bank account by Wednesday night.

Great performance by Scottie, huh? I’m referring to the Tour communications team. did He tweeted a statistic that marked Scheffler as the first player in recorded history to lead by seven or more strokes after the first round of a Tour event. Surely this minor detail — Scheffler was 10 under par, two strokes clear of second place, before landing in Atlanta — was omitted due to character counting.Don’t let facts get in the way of a good record!) The tweet was deservedly criticized.

Scheffler’s lead would grow to seven on Sunday, then shrink to two and finally settle at four over Morikawa, the raw champion, with the outcome never in doubt. Scheffler outscored the fourth-place finisher by 11, and his winning score of 30 under par erased the “tournament record.”

Just like that, the Tour season is over and once again, almost everything but the players’ pockets feel a little empty.

I commend the Tour for trying to innovate. The move to the 70-50-30 model for course sizes has been a marked improvement. But the staggered start, now in Year 6, just isn’t it. It’s not golf. It’s not any Sport. How silly would it be if Georgia were seen kicking a field goal before the CFP national championship game’s opening kickoff? Or if we let Katie Ledecky dive into the water at the other end of the pool in the 800 freestyle, already 50 meters ahead? It’s a problem when Scheffler joins Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh as the only players since 1983 to win seven or more times in a single season and we’re left wondering if an asterisk is necessary.

At his State of the Tour press conference on Wednesday, Commissioner Jay Monahan used the word “fan(s)” 54 times. “Fans are at the center of everything we do,” Monahan said. “Their voice drives us.”

I wonder how many fans actually love this Tour Championship format. Maybe I’m wrong, but it can’t be that many. This is purely anecdotal, but I texted two of my friends (I think they are friends); both are big golf fans, especially when it comes to golf on YouTube, and are pretty close to the kind of demographic the Tour claims to be targeting. One responded bluntly: I think the format is super duper dumb.The second friend was a little more thorough: I think the aim of the tournament is wrong. It’s about crowning the best golfer of the season, but that’s already decided (Scottie) and this tournament doesn’t usually change that.

Not even Scheffler, the man who stands to benefit most from this new way of crowning a FedExCup champion, considers himself one of the sponsors. For him, it is a “strange format.”

“Personally, I didn’t have too many issues with the old format,” Scheffler said. “… It didn’t necessarily bother me that the winner of the Tour Championship wasn’t the winner of the FedExCup.”

However, the Tour had already argued that the original format was too confusing. Now, we have media outlets (including this one) displaying raw rankings on their websites, an Official World Golf Ranking that doesn’t even acknowledge net competition, and a generally unserious atmosphere throughout the week.Seriously, I can’t wait for the Fall Series and Q-School, two segments of the calendar that the Tour needs to promote more..)

The Tour is caught between two swing patterns here.

He wants the FedExCup to be a season-long race, but Scheffler’s 1,193-point lead over Xander Schauffele would have been completely wiped out had Scheffler, even with a two-shot lead to start, played poorly. In the five previous Tour Championships in the SSE (Staggered Start Era), only twice has the FedExCup No. 1 entering the Tour Championship finished there (Dustin Johnson in 2020 and Patrick Cantlay in 2021).

An interesting playoff is also in order. Sure, Rory McIlroy winning the 2022 Tour Championship by one stroke after starting the tournament four shots behind Scheffler was a thrill. But keep in mind that no other Tour champion has finished lower than fifth in points after the BMW. The staggered start eliminates more than two-thirds of the 30-man field before even a tee ball is hit. This year, it was probably a bit more than that.

How can we fix this? And don’t take this criticism the wrong way: I want the Tour to succeed.

First, the Tour needs to fully commit to a true playoff system. Dole out season-long bonuses before the Tour Championship, then reset points for the top 30 so that everyone arrives at East Lake on a level playing field. The Tour Championship shouldn’t be a victory lap, a farce meant to put an exclamation point on whoever had the best season. It should be a knockout event, where a player’s performance over the previous 34 weeks is thrown out the window; if he doesn’t do well at the Tour Championship, he doesn’t walk away with the big trophy, and that’s it.

Who cares if Billy Horschel wins the Tour Championship?I use Billy as an example because I know he won’t be offended.) The Tour is quickly moving in a direction where it is creating protection after protection to keep its current stars in the spotlight while making it extremely difficult for new stars to emerge.

If it were up to me, the Tour Championship would be a match play. The top two in points would get byes, and when players were eliminated, they would enter a consolation qualifier. By Sunday afternoon, we’d have not only a fight for first place for $25 million (or less if we want to redistribute some of that money before East Lake), but 14 other fights for various sums of money. We won’t always have Scheffler versus Schauffele, but is Scheffler on cruise control for four days — and with a 10-shot lead over the lone fourth to start the final round — something to watch on television? Did anyone care what McIlroy did on Sunday this year? Now, what if McIlroy went head-to-head with Ludvig Åberg?

But let’s say you hate the idea of ​​match play. Well, then, how about this?

72 holes of stroke play.

The lowest score wins.

A novel idea, I know.