Mickelson > BMW Champ.

[FireStorm]

ESPN.com just announced that Phil will be skipping the BMW, citing family reasons and fatigue. This casts even more doubt on the future of the Fedex Cup, as it appears to be becoming a full on joke. This will be twice in three events that the leader has decided to sit out 25% of the playoffs, not to mention other defections such as Ernie Els, Padraig Harrington, and KJ Choi's injury.

[ClubChamp04]

Is sounds like a slap in the face to Tim Finchem. Phil said in his post round interview yesterday that he was looking forward to some rules that would encourage the top players to play every event but they were never put into effect. I guarantee there will be more incentive to play every event next year in hopes of getting Tiger and Phil there every week.

[pokergrader]

This really sucks for the fans. This thing was starting to heat up. Hopefully the tour championship will be as exciting as yesterday's final round was.

[shemp]

Tiger is the key. He drives ratings. And this publicity, even the negative stuff, is probably good for the "fedex."

There's a structural problem with trying to induce the elite golfers to play 4-6 weeks in a row-- one of the things that makes/keeps most of them elite is not doing that. That combined with, when the elite play they rack up so much of the prize pool, that even in this structure they can take a week off and compete for the ultimate prize.

[FireStorm]

Off the original topic that I started but another issue with the Fedex is the bizarre points distribution. It seems there's very little going on in terms of actual "playoffs". The way the points are awarded, 85% of NEXT weeks field is pretty much set before the completion of THIS week's tournament. At the Barclays, 2 players above 120th managed to catch up and move ahead. At the Deutchse bank, again only 2 were able to move up from worse than 70th into the top 70. I've looked at the points alloted for this week and there's literally no chance that more than 4 players can move from worse than 30th to get into the Tour Championship. This seems pretty silly.

[Brocktoon]

This looks pretty damning for the Cup.

Week 1: World #1 and points leader does not show up.

Week 2: #2 in points withdraws after round 1.

Week 3: Last weeks winner, overall points leader and World #2 decides to skip the 3rd leg of the 4 week playoff race citing "family reasons and fatigue" after publicly stating he was on the fence about playing. To add insult to injury I believe he even said that he was going to be in Chicago this week anyway.

Looks like the PGA needs tom come up with a better structure and/or more incentive. It seems pretty clear that even a $10M annuity isn't enough to get the game's best as fired up as the league would have liked.

[Nick B.]

This point structure is retarded. First, last, last, last gets more points that 4,4,5,5.

[FireStorm]

That is pretty brutal.

[Uglyowl]

[ QUOTE ]
. Without prompting, he mentioned on NBC Sports after his two-shot victory that he had made several suggestions to Finchem that were not acted upon.

Then, he refused to elaborate what those suggestions were.

"My frustration from this past year came from asking for a couple of things in the FedEx Cup that weren't done and not really feeling all that bad now if I happen to miss (an event)," Mickelson said Monday.

[/ QUOTE ]

You play golf and make millions of dollars you [censored] crybaby.

[Butcho22]

meh