[WLVRYN]

If the PGA tour just wants to reward the season long best player, they wouldnt need a playoff, they could just pay out the $10M to the player of the year.

Think about every other major sport (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) except for NASCAR (since I dont know how the Chase works). Those teams play all season for postseason seeding, but they still need to win in the postseason to win the championship. You could be the best team in the league in the regular season and flame out in the playoffs and go home with nothing, or you could have a team like the Steelers a few years ago that gets hot at the right time and wins it all.

The PGA tour tried to create a hybrid playoff/regular season system that rewarded both regular season play and playoff play, hoping that Tiger would build a big enough lead during the regular season and maybe win one event during the playoffs and walk away with the title. By design, they ended up in the situation where they're at, in which the big names can skip a week and still win it all and people are bitching.

No matter how they structure it, some people will hate it. You can either have a true playoff and risk not having Tiger in it if he has a bad week, or have a sort of playoff and allow the guys to skip but still have a chance to win.

I'd prefer to have a two payout system. One is the POY, who gets $5M based on season long performance. Top guys can opt of the playoffs, but still will be playing for money in the season long championship. You also make the points for the playoff events higher to entice the top guys to play at the end, but maybe allow them to take a week off as well. That way there's a balance for guys not wanting to play every week to still have something to play for.

The other is the winner of the playoffs, where the points generally only count for performance during the playoff period. This will force the top players to play every week in order to try to advance if they want to go for this. Sure this may mean that Steve Stricker or Scott Verplank or somebody not named Tiger wins the playoffs, but that's the chance you take by creating the playoffs in the first place.