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Nobody asked me, but I can fix the FedEx Cup. Not that it’s shattered into thousands of pieces, but a nip here and a tuck there to what the PGA Tour is trying to convince us are “playoffs,’’ and I could make everyone a tad happier.
Unfortunately, Tim Finchem is going to beat me to the punch. The PGA Tour commissioner said as much last week at the Tour Championship in Atlanta.
“We’ve just got to look to the future and see what we are faced with, and then make some adjustments,’’ Finchem proclaimed.
Granted, nobody knows exactly what that means. But that’s the way Finchem thinks and talks. About the only thing he said that made sense was – believe it or not! – the boss liked the controversy the Cup created. Like Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods each skipping a tournament, and the quibble over annuities versus cash payouts.
“Candidly, I don’t think it’s hurt the Cup that much,’’ he said of his top two players’ well-chronicled “WDs.’’ “We like a lot of the controversy that has surrounded elements of the system. We like it because it gets people talking about the Cup; it gets people interested in the Cup, and that’s fun.’’
Who ever thought that the Tour would make the connection between “bad news’’ being better than “no news,’’ which is what the PGA Tour had been dealing with every September with the start of the NFL season. But why not let the controversy take place between the ropes rather than outside them?
Here are my suggestions to the commish on how he can deliver a better FedEx package in 2008, and possibly produce one of the legitimate stories of the season outside of Tiger Woods winning everything in sight.
*Reduce the format to three tournaments, with purses that build from $7 million to $8.5 million to $10 million. Hey, if these guys can’t play three in a row for that kind of money, they don’t deserve to win the Cup any way. The natural move here is to eliminate Chicago, give it back the Western Open, and move it to the Western’s old date -- which might just bring back the crowds! Otherwise, more defections are coming, according to Woods. “The way the schedule is now, guys who missed one this year might miss more than one next year,’’ he warned after his latest record romp.
*Start out this three-tournament run with 100 players instead of 144 and cut the field to 70 players and then to 30. If you miss a cut or withdraw from a tournament, you’re out of the playoffs. Hey, if the No. 1 seed is upset in college basketball’s March Madness, do they bring the team back for the Final Four? No. And if a competition is truly ongoing, do you ever have the option to withdraw and then rejoin the field at a later date? Enough said.
*Set the points up to create more movement, so it’s more about what’s happening now and less about the season past. If the fans are to embrace the FedEx Cup it needs to be fresh and volatile. That certainly wasn’t the case this time around as only three players – Scottsdale’s Tim Clark (No. 36), Brett Wetterich (No. 50) and Camilo Villegas (No. 52) -- ended up cracking the top 30 during the Cup’s four-week run. Who knows? Maybe more than five guys will end up with a chance to win at the end unlike last week.
*Give them the cold, hard cash if that’s what they want, as a $10 million annuity doesn’t seem to trip triggers among the “right here, right now’’ generation. Set it up like the lottery, in that you can have $10 million on paper, or a $5 million stack of greenbacks on the 18th green. (Considering the taxes on the instant gratification, they might even think twice.) This is a no-brainer, as all the Tour has to do is not spend a staggering $45 million promoting the event next time around like it did initially.
*After the changes are in place, make each player go to at least a two-hour seminar on how the new FedEx Cup works so we don’t get a season full of dumb-and-dumber answers when reporter asks them how it all works. OK, so most of today’s Tour players don’t even “get’’ the Rules of Golf, perhaps they can be schooled on how there potentially biggest payday of the season actually works. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even understand it!
I’m sure I could come up with a few more possible tweaks, but we’ll keep it simple for all parties this time around. For the most part, the FedEx Cup was a middle-of-the-road success, but there needs to be more buzz if the PGA Tour is going to get those mediocre television ratings – which ranged from 2.1 to 4.3 (one point equals one household) -- to resemble major championship numbers in the 5.0 stratosphere and higher.
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