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The Wyndham Championship field this season is unusually good. Maybe not as good as last year when Tiger Woods decided to give it a go in the final regular season event of the PGA Tour season to try and win to get into the FedEx Cup Playoffs (which he nearly did) but still pretty solid.

This should not necessarily be the case. Top players should be resting up for the FedEx Cup Playoffs, which start next week. Most of them are doing just that. But one is not.

The highest-ranked player in this week's field is Rickie Fowler, who flew from the 2016 Rio Olympics to Greensboro, North Carolina, for the tournament. Why in the world is the No. 8 player in the OWGR (and the only player in the top 13 of the OWGR) playing in the last tournament before the playoffs (which he has already easily qualified for)?

Well, we have ourselves a little Ryder Cup problem at the moment.

Fowler finds himself on the outside looking in at the top eight in U.S. Ryder Cup standings at the moment (the top eight all qualify). He will have to either win or finish second this week to shoot back up into the top eight. Now this likely will not be a problem because captain Davis Love III will probably take him as a captain's pick anyway, but that's not a foregone conclusion for somebody who has not played all that well this season.

"It would be nice to get some more FedExCup points," said Fowler last week at the Olympics. "But my commitment to the Ryder Cup and wanting to be a part of that team, there's different styles of events. But the Ryder Cup and the experiences I've had there, it's the best team event there is in golf.

"I don't want to be left off that team, so I want to go there and try and get myself some points. Obviously not playing well in the majors and the double-point events has put me down the list quite a bit. So that's the reason I'm going there, to show the commitment to The Ryder Cup and how much it means to me."

It's a smart move because, even if he doesn't place in the top two, Love can still see how much the Ryder Cup means to him. Fowler is also on the Ryder Cup task force so it would be sort of odd to leave him off the team altogether no matter what happens at the Wyndham Championship.