"Why spend $40 million this way?"

GolfDigest.com’s John Feinstein makes several strong points in trying to understand what a secret $40 million pool for players already doing well and to keep them from fleeing to something that “doesn’t even exist at the moment.”

I continue to marvel at the FedExCup ramifications, some positive and some really make you scratch your head. The positive: it looks like a wonderful merit-based competition compared to the “Player Impact Program”, even with points resets.

But as Feinstein writes…

And so the first question: Where is the tour getting the $40 million? At the moment, there’s no corporate sponsor and there’s not likely to be one, if only because Fred Smith, the CEO of FedEx, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the tour dating to 2007, would probably lose his mind if PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan stood up and proudly announced a new multi-million-dollar corporate partnership in order to pay 10 players millions of dollars.

As it is, one wonders how FedEx, whose contract with the tour runs through 2027, is going to react to a new program that rewards players for being popular. Flawed as the FedEx Cup playoff system is, the hundreds of millions the company has invested has gotten the top players to keep playing through the end of the summer after the major championships are over. That was the whole point when then-commissioner Tim Finchem convinced FedEx to sign on in the first place. FedEx and the PGA Tour are now so closely entwined that the FedEx logo is imbedded in the floor of the lobby inside the tour’s new multi-million-dollar headquarters.