ORLANDO, Fla. -- If the rank-and-file players on the PGA Tour weren’t confused enough already, the schemes being considered for the controversial overhaul of Qualifying School and its merger with the developmental Nationwide as the main access point to golf’s big leagues just got more complicated.

Tuesday at the AT&T National event outside Washington, D.C., the tour’s Policy Board was expected to adopt and finalize one of the proposals on the table for the merger of the primary qualifying avenues to the PGA Tour, but instead balked.

Hey, it's what legislator types do in D.C. all the time, right?

Two overhaul plans had been under heaviest consideration, but a third option emerged in recent discussions and the four players on the Policy Board felt the new proposal needed to be floated past the membership before any final decision was made.

As outlined earlier, the Nationwide season will end in the early fall with three qualifying tournaments that will include the top 75 players on that tour's money list, the players ranked 126-200 on the PGA Tour's FedEx Cup points list. The top 50 at the end of those three tournaments will receive full PGA Tour status for the following season.

Here's a look at the broader points of the new plan as it was initially laid out by the tour in March:

http://www.cbssports.com/golf/story/17926964/biggest-overhaul-in-pga-tour-history-better-be-deadon

Details have been harder to come by.

The fields in the three qualifiers would include approximately 144 players all told, but assigning a weighting to the trio of tournaments remains a huge issue. For instance, did a player who finished No. 126 on the PGA Tour have a better year than the guy who was 26th on the Nationwide, and thus deserve to be seeded accordingly?

The Policy Board is trying to balance rewarding players who had superior seasons while giving players a chance to earn cards with a three-tournament rush at the end. 

As it stands, the trio of events will be held as the 2013 FedEx series is being staged in approximately 14 months. The final iteration of Q-School, at least as it has been constituted for decades, will come later this year. STarting next year, the combo Q-School/Nationwide qualifying plan begins.

Amid plenty of hand-wringing and criticism, the tour committed to detonating Q-school in March, before many details had been ironed out. Moreover, Nationwide is stepping aside as the title sponsor at the end of 2012 and no replacement has been identified.

Some have characterized the changes as the most sweeping overhaul in tour history, or at least since the split from former parent organization PGA of America. Q-School has been around since the 1960s, and at once point was held twice annually.

There was one morsel of the overhaul that was finalized at the meeting – the Policy Board elected to award full FedEx Cup points for the so-called Fall Series events nest year, when the tour moved to a season that begins with the Frys.com Open outside San Jose. The tournaments in the latter portion of the season had not previously been part of the FedEx season at all and had been marginalized in importance as a result.

“With the fall tournaments moving to the front end of the PGA Tour schedule, the Policy Board believes the next logical step is for these tournaments to kick off the FedExCup and begin awarding full points," tour commissioner Tim Finchem said. "All of these tournaments have been very successful and certainly deserve to be part of the FedEx Cup competition."

With the move to a wraparound season, the Frys.com event bats leadoff.

“We’re now on equal footing with most of the tournaments,” Frys tournament president Duke Butler told the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday. “And leading up to the season-opening tournament, most players will have three weeks off …  so we think they’ll have fresh legs and a lot of eagerness to make their next start. I think we’ll be very competitive with other tournaments.”

A few weeks back, Frys.com officials sent a rather terse letter to the tour, all but demanding that it be given full FedEx Cup points.