PARAMUS, N.J. -- Fans, not to mention more than a few players, wanted more upheaval. Upchucking, well, that's something that wasn't anticipated.
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| 'The idea was to make the playoffs more valuable,' Stewart Cink says. (Getty Images) |
This is volatility in a blender. Please press puree.
After months of grousing and discussion, the PGA Tour this spring finally overhauled its FedEx series points system to generate more week-to-week movement. Maybe they should have underhauled instead.
Under a broiling sun Sunday at The Barlays, the FedEx opener, they broke out the commotion lotion. Everybody expected things, in the second season of the revamped format, to be unpredictable, more unstable.
It felt more like fickle, actually.
With the first FedEx event of '08 in the books, it turns out that there were dissenting voices aboard the Ponte Vedra Beach team bus regarding the points gerrymandering, fellows on the tour Policy Board who felt like the regular season was being marginalized and the four-event FedEx was turning into a sprint, too much of a sweepstakes that didn't reflect a season's worth of accomplishment.
"Obviously, the idea was to make the playoffs more valuable," said Policy Board member Stewart Cink after finishing his round Sunday. "Trust me, we looked at it so many different ways, our heads were spinning."
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.
But nobody else on the board felt similarly other than Zach Johnson, a non-voting member, he said. So here we are, with the tour's version of the Indy or Daytona 500. That is, the regular season is now akin to qualifying, where the fastest cars sit on the pole or across the front row. From there, it's up to the drivers to steer it around like maniacs to get across the finish line in four different locales.
It doesn't get much nuttier than this. Unheralded rookie Kevin Streelman was at No. 120 on the money list headed into the Greensboro event last week, his card for 2009 in jeopardy, before finishing tied for sixth. Yet if the Barclays event had ended after 54 holes, when Streelman was holding a one-shot lead, he would have jumped 101 spots up the FedEx points list and into solo first place.
