"I was hesitant to weight the playoffs this heavily, to be honest"

Boy, you try and tweak to deliver volatility and now they aren't happy!

Steve Elling complains about the new FedEx Cup volatility and finds a soul sister in PGA Tour policy board member Stewart Cink, who has already rendered his verdict.

Now we all have motion sickness. Vijay Singh collected his fourth career Barclays title and jumped from seventh to first in FedEx points, and while that sounds like healthy leapfrogging, it was the absolute least tumult that could have happened given the far-flung scenarios that might have played out at Ridgewood Country Club.

Here's a real after-the-fact kicker. Cink has been a good company man all season and widely espoused the benefits of the new points system, but now that there are some crazy cracks showing and his peers are questioning him about the merits of the details the Policy Board authorized, he has come clean.

"I was hesitant to weight the playoffs this heavily, to be honest," he said.

Because lord knows you are entitled to another year end check for showing up four more times and continuing the mediocrity.

I have to say that for some bigtime free market preachers, some of these PGA Tour dudes sure don't like a little, uh, volatility driven by market forces (in this case, those forces are called playing well.) Imagine if they had a true playoff, or even a modified one and wiped the slate clean at some point. The bitching would epic!

Right now, that list would include Kevin Sutherland, a veteran with one career win, who hadn't been noticed in weeks and lost in a three-way playoff Sunday with Singh and Sergio Garcia. Or winless veteran Mathew Goggin, who hadn't been noticed all season.

"It's more than just about the bonus money," Cink said. "Guys who played well all year are getting knocked out of majors."

Ahhhh....now the truth comes out. Has that really happened yet?

Bob Labbance, R.I.P.

Anthony Pioppi reports the sad news in a Golf Club Atlas post.

Faldo: "The guys are really twitched up about it right now"

Poor Captain Faldo, so many players, so few picks. John Huggan weighs Faldo's options and sees Casey-Poulter with Darren Clarke stepping into a spot if either qualifies on points. 

Steve Elling talks to Faldo about where things stand:

Every panicky player with a shot at making the team, with one notable exception, is playing this week in either New Jersey or Holland.

"The guys are really twitched up about it right now," Faldo said after finishing his commentary work for the Golf Channel on Friday. "The amazing thing, now I've got Darren Clarke leading.

"Crumps, I've got probably six names, unless they can jump in -- which would obviously be the best way to make the team -- but I could have four or five players outside playing well and it looks like I have to make a blooming decision."

Randell Mell sums up the most important point from a media perspective. The thought of Monty not making the team is "flat-out depressing."

"I think if we don't see a change, we'll be disappointed,"

Steve Elling considers the Barclays' move to Liberty National next year and offers this perspective from Barclays president Bob Diamond:

Last year, when Woods skipped The Barclays, the tournament was whipped in the ratings by the Little League World Series, televised on a cable outlet, ESPN. He acknowledged that was hard to stomach.  

"I think if we don't see a change, we'll be disappointed," Diamond said. "We'll see."

"The helicopter was supposed to fly over the course Friday and drop 1,500 numbered golf balls."

Let's hope that these guys pull through. And let's hope that next time they rent a balloon.

One man is in critical condition and another in fair condition following a helicopter crash at a Schuylkill County golf course.

A nursing supervisor at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville says co-pilot Joseph Matteo is in critical condition. Pilot Al Roman is listed in fair condition at Reading Hospital and Medical Center. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating.

The helicopter was supposed to fly over the course Friday and drop 1,500 numbered golf balls. The person whose ball was closest to the pin would have won 50 percent of ticket sales.

The fundraiser was for Access Services, a group that helps people with disabilities.

"Meanwhile the FedEx Cup remains a play for relevance via monetization and marketing, which looks especially silly every other year, when top players are more concerned about playing for God and country at the Ryder Cup."

Here I was thinking we had at least another two weeks before the FedEx Cup obituaries started rolling in and Cameron Morfit had to go and pen one before the art department could even come up with a cutesy graphic.

The FedEx Cup is stuck in a major end-of-season traffic jam. All of the individual events anyone cares about are over. In fact, judging from the breathless, parking lot stakeouts of Brett Favre, the press and public tuned out the Tiger-less Tour even during the year's final major. Paddy's PGA was no match for Brett's SUV.

And still the FedEx soldiers on despite the Olympics and an upcoming two-week break after the BMW Championship, necessitated by the Ryder Cup. Ultimately only 30 players will convene for the FedEx finale, the Tour Championship at East Lake outside Atlanta, because the smaller the field, the more "exclusive" (important) it is.

That's the idea, anyway. In reality a limited field holds limited appeal because it increases the likelihood that one hot player will run away with the tournament. It happened last year with Woods, but a mere mortal also could run away and hide with only 29 other guys chasing him. (A total of 315 players started the U.S. Amateur on Monday.)

Of course if there was a true playoff and daily eliminations at East Lake it wouldn't be so dull, would it?

Perhaps the FedEx champion won't be determined until the back nine on Sunday of the Tour Championship. That would be nice, but the rules are complicated. The Tour has arbitrarily narrowed the gap between players to start the playoffs, from 1,000 to 500 points. Every player who makes the cut at the Barclays will get 2,000 more points than he would have last year. This is meant to create more volatility up and down the standings.

The Amateur is simple. Two guys go into a match, and only one lives to play another day, sometimes after a wild momentum swing or five, which is typical of match play.

And if you had daily eliminations you would...oh continue on Cameron:

Meanwhile the FedEx Cup remains a play for relevance via monetization and marketing, which looks especially silly every other year, when top players are more concerned about playing for God and country at the Ryder Cup.

"That's approximately 40 percent of the primary-event sponsors."

Thanks to reader Steven T. for Bill Huffman's look at the struggles of FBR, title sponsor for the PGA Tour's Scottsdale stop. Huffman leads with this:

With America's financial sector struggling mightily, it is significant to note that 15 of 37 PGA Tour regular-season events - major championships and fall season excluded - are sponsored by banks or investment firms.

That's approximately 40 percent of the primary-event sponsors. 

And this is not good for an overpaid VP who wants to be the next severely overpaid Commish:

Rick George, the executive vice president and chief of operations for the PGA Tour, responded: "We're planning to have another great FBR Open again next year."

Asked if the PGA Tour was aware of FBR's financial struggles, George, who took over his new duties just a few months ago, said: "No, I'm not in tune with that."

"I think, finally, we are playing a good golf course"

Steve Elling reports that Vijay Singh delivered an impromptu rant on the Oakland Hills PGA setup, perhaps egged on by the modest setup and more reasonable greens at Ridgewood.

"I think, finally, we are playing a good golf course," Singh said of Ridgewood.

Ouch. Within moments, he made it doubly clear that he was both praising Ridgewood and pasting Oakland Hills.

Two things to consider when weighing Singh's considered opinion: First, he is a former PGA Championship winner, so he's not going to launch into a dated diatribe without good reason. Then again, he was credited with five-putting one of Oakland Hills' undulating greens, which Jack Nicklaus once characterized as the toughest in golf.

"From tee to green that's one of the best golf courses I have played, but it's a disgrace to have greens like that on a golf course that good," Singh said of Oakland Hills, site of multiple U.S. Opens and PGAs in years past, not to mention the 2004 Ryder Cup.

"If the members were to play the speed of the greens we played, they would all quit," he said. "I don't think there would be any members left.

"I don't know what the PGA was going at. I don't think they could ever hold another golf tournament on that course if the greens are like that."

The course underwent a tweaking and lengthening three years ago by designer Rees Jones, but the greens were essentially untouched. Maybe they should have been bulldozed, too, Singh said.

"They should get somebody to redesign those greens," he groused. "From tee to green it's one of the best golf courses you can ever play. But on the greens, it was just a disaster."

Barclay's Classic Photo Caption Help

Phil ringing the opening bell on Wall Street Wednesday, courtesy of golf.com.  I think you can do better...

“If you’re doing P&L’s these guys have done spectacularly."

There's nothing golf related in Richard Sandomir's story on ESPN firing the first warning shot in bidding on the next two Olympics games, just some beautiful businesspeak that our friends and Ponte Vedra may want to note.

“Our DNA is different than theirs,” John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content said by telephone on Tuesday. “We serve sports fans. It’s hard in our culture to fathom tape-delaying in the same way they have. I’m not suggesting it wasn’t the smart thing for them to do, but it’s not our culture. We did Euro 2008 in the afternoon. We’ve done the World Cup in the middle of the morning. We have different audiences.”

I always love the talk of culture and ESPN. They two words really are synonymous.

Skipper, who returned earlier this week from Beijing after attending the Summer Games, said NBC’s enormous success over the first 11 nights of the Games “probably forces us to change some of our calculations.”

“If you’re doing P&L’s,” he went on, referring to profits and losses, “these guys have done spectacularly. If I was holding the rights to this, this is a great time to be selling them.”

Meanwhile, the thought of golf in the Olympics prompted this positive post by Iain Carter at the BBC, with one caveat: he wants to see a better format. Who doesn't?  Gary Van Sickle at golf.com was not so kind.