Phil: Volatility Means I Can Spend More Time Not Playing!

Steve Elling notes Phil Mickelson's bizarre remarks Wednesday.

With it becoming increasingly obvious that the sweeping points overhaul has placed too much emphasis on the performances of players in the four-event playoff series and devalued the importance of play in the regular season, Phil Mickelson dropped a bomb Thursday at the Deutsche Bank Championship that probably had a few officers at tour headquarters reaching for aspirin, if not hankies.

Those aren't raindrops from the latest tropical storm falling in Ponte Vedra Beach, those are teardrops of sheer fright. After a handful of prominent players had expressed the opinion Thursday that the new FedEx points system had overreached, Mickelson offered an entirely unanticipated answer.

"I think that the intent was to have more turnover, and certainly it has done that," he said. "I don't feel as though the season, the regular season, has anywhere near the same impact that it had, and so that could be a good thing because now we don't have to play as many events if we don't want to."

Uh-oh.

The points volatility is going to shine a big bright light on something we've known all along: way too many of the PGA Tour's finest are spoiled, unimaginative or willing to realize just how weak their "product" is these days. 

Of course it means the regular season means less. But for a little excitement at the end, isn't it worth it? Do these guys realize how little interest there is in the PGA Tour playoffs?

Comments

[DavidC]

Phil considers an event season a lot and will play less because of the points volatility? This kind of logic is precisely why other players hate him.

[Hawkeye]

Here's what's going to happen if the FedEx cup isn't terminated soon:

- The regular PGA Tour season will prove increasingly meaningless, and few top players will play more than four or five non-major, non-WGC tournaments.
- Many top players will opt for European Tour membership starting in ´09, since the shorter PGA Tour season opens up the ability to play for more serious dough in Dubai and China.
- Regular US tournaments, deprived of star-driven interest, will not be able to attract sponsors and will therefore die.
- The PGA Tour will become similar to what the European Tour is today: A tour consisting of approximately one tournament a month with a big purse and a good field, interspersed by second-tier tournaments attracting mainly local interest.
- Realizing this, the PGA Tour and the European Tour join forces and create a 25-event world tour that starts in China in January-February, moves to the US in March-April for what's left of the West Coast and Florida swings plus The Masters, over to Europe in May, hops back briefly across the pond for the US Open, then stays in Europe until the British Open, goes back to the US for some tiredbut traditional tree-lined events, then moves over to the Persian Gulf for the oil-fuelled grand finale.

In other words, the season the International stars play today will eventually become official. And seriously, is that such a bad thing?

[thusgone]

i can't see how phil's analysis is wrong. with the points set-up as it is, players only need to play well enough in the regular season to get into the top 144 or whatever, and then turn it on in the "post-season." sort of like hockey and pro basketball. the other side of that strategy is that a player is less likely to miss one of the playoff tournaments (if the points rejiggering has not already made missing a playoff tournament undoable).

i thought the purpose of the fed ex cup was to get the stars to play more late in the season. if guys like phil and tiger are not inclined to play more tournaments overall, then incentivizing them to play more late season event necessarily endangers their participation in earlier, less important tournament, doesnt it?

[alan]

the problem with the past, current and future fedex point systems is driven by the 144 qualifiers and the 4 rounds of tournaments. both are too many. cut the qualifiers to the top 100 off the money list (no one follows the points), have 2 preliminary tournaments; then take the top 50 off the money list for the championship with a $25-50 million purse, period

[Erik J. Barzeski]

"Do these guys realize how little interest there is in the PGA Tour playoffs?"

Disagree. And hey, you wrote a whole post (one of many) about it. Four of the articles currently on the home page are about the "playoffs" almost exclusively.

Yeah, some of it's manufactured "interest," but it's genuine for a lot of people, and certainly for the players.

[C. Little]

I hope the whole damn thing comes crashing down, real soon.

[NevanderH]

I really like Hawkeye's final prediction of the two tours joining up and trimming the tournaments to what is now the schedule of most of the great European stars. We will see bigger purses, leaner and meaner fields, and an overall better product.