Is Horschel the Man to Beat?

By: Tony Dear


It's about this time of year the FedEx Cup and the Playoffs it uses to identify who is, supposedly, the year's top performer on the PGA Tour, come under close scrutiny. Are they any good? Do they work? Do they have a shred of credibility? Not long ago, you would have to go 20 pages deep into Google to find a single article/blog that had anything positive to say about it, but over the last couple of years, the volume of the naysayers' invective has weakened slightly with some of the more audible critics even conceding it is probably here to stay, and that having four quality tournaments close the season is certainly preferable to the rather limp and lackluster anticlimax in place up until 2007 when Tiger Woods won the first FedEx Cup with two wins in the three playoff events he played.

It was clear from the outset, however, that, though finishing with a bang in September and awarding the winner $10 million helped retain fans' interest a while longer, changes would be necessary. Several tweaks have indeed been made. The once impossibly complex points system is now a little easier to grasp even if few fans actually know how many points are being played for each week, and the $10 million - a large part of it anyway - is now a cash reward the winner can spend that same evening in the East Lake pro shop if he chooses (assuming it's open) rather than some slip of paper notifying him the money has been hidden away in some tax-deferred retirement account he can't touch until he's 45.

The 2014 version is surely a lot better than its predecessors, and players are beginning to say how much winning the FedEx Cup would mean to them, beyond the 10 mil. To be fair, they've been saying that for a while, but now they're saying it in one-on-one interviews rather than just on the FedEx Cup TV ads. It seems they might actually mean it. Of course, no one's view is sufficiently clouded to think it would be comparable to winning a major, but it is apparent players recognize the unquestionable value in winning a season-long competition.

Ah, but there's the snag. Is it actually a season-long competition? Or is it a bottom-heavy dash at the end that awards an excessive number of points to playoff winners who have hitherto been mediocre and not in the picture - not even in the same room as the picture really?

Chris Kirk is this year's poster child for the FedEx Cup's unmerited flash of fame. No, that's not at all fair. The 29-year-old from Atlanta has won twice this year, most recently at the Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston of course, where he beat a major-like field playing with Rory McIlroy in the final round to jump from relative obscurity (17th) to the top of the standings. It also earned him a place in Tom Watson's Ryder Cup wild-card conversation, which had been unthinkable just a few days before.

The previous week, much the same had happened to Hunter Mahan whose unremarkable run of form had seen him go 48 tournaments without a win. The Californian won The Barclays in New Jersey and jumped 61 spots in the standings. It was also enough to convince Watson he should be wearing the red, white and blue at Gleneagles.

Kirk, Mahan, BMW champion Billy Horschel, and Bubba Watson may have won more, but perhaps the player who has gorged most happily on playoff points (1,526 since the playoffs began) is Morgan Hoffman who, at 124th in the standings, barely made it into the field for The Barclays, but now, after finishing tied for ninth at Ridgewood GC, tied for 35th in Boston, and third in Denver last weekend, is 21st and in the field for this week's Tour Championship. He has a chance, admittedly a slim one, of walking away with enough money to finance the private plane (you can pick up a decent second-hand Cessna Citation for about $4 million) the pilot's license he is close to earning will allow him to fly.

The points reset following the regular season that first happened in 2009 has enabled these sizeable and unexpected leaps up the standings and, therefore, a good amount of meaningful activity heading into the final week of the season. But they do rather diminish the significance of the regular season tournaments, at least where the FedEx Cup is concerned. You'd have to win five regular season events - at 500 points each - to match the guy who got hot at a playoff tournament worth 2,500.

Maybe that's as it should be though. Everyone knows the significance of the playoffs and how important they are in the FedEx Cup scheme of things. It happens in every sport: play well at the sharp end of the season and you have a good chance of bagging some hardware.

But I think we can dispense with the idea the FedEx Cup identifies the best golfer over the course of the entire season which, maybe I missed something, was the point all along.

The other area that needs attention is having tournaments in four straight weeks. With the WGC Bridgestone, PGA Championship, playoffs and, for 14 players at this week's Tour Championship, the Ryder Cup, some players feel the need for a break and chose not to enter one of the playoff events. Others, well one player in particular, enter them but decided to withdraw halfway through.

There definitely needs to be an off-week somewhere, be it after the first two playoffs or between the third and fourth.

Tim Finchem actually addressed this issue Tuesday morning, saying the four-week stretch wouldn't happen again.

So, now we're here at East Lake, who's going to win? Will one of the top five in the standings ensure they capture the FedEx Cup by winning this week, or will the season champion come from lower down the order, like Jim Furyk did four years ago?

At seventh in the standings, Furyk is a popular bet. "All" he needs to do to win again is go lowest this weekend and hope Kirk finishes in a three-way tie for second or worse, and Horschel comes in tied for second or worse. That certainly isn't beyond the realms of possibility, nor is fourth-placed McIlroy winning his first FedEx Cup. He can finish as low as third in Atlanta and still have a mathematical chance of putting a big, fat cherry on top of an already mammoth cake.

You feel, though, that Horschel might be the man of the moment. The 27-year-old from Florida could finish in a two-way tie for sixth and still win the Cup. He's tied for second and beaten a world-class field in the last two weeks, and East Lake would appear to set up nicely for his sound tee-to-green game (11th in Total Driving, fourth in Greens in Regulation).

But whether Horschel wins it or not, another FedEx Cup will go in the books and we'll be one year closer to knowing if the players, fans and media finally accepted it, or if the Cup was a perfectly sound idea that just never really took off.

Tony Dear is an Englishman living in Bellingham, Wash. In the early 1990s he was a member of the Liverpool University golf team which played its home matches at Royal Liverpool GC. Easy access to Hoylake made it extremely difficult for him to focus on Politics, his chosen major. After leaving Liverpool, he worked as a golf instructor at a club just south of London where he also made a futile attempt at becoming a 'player.' He moved into writing when it became abundantly clear he had no business playing the game for a living. A one-time golf correspondent of the New York Sun, Tony is a member of the Golf Writers Association of America, the Pacific Northwest Golf Media Association and the Golf Travel Writers Association. He is a multi-award winning journalist, and edits his own website at www.bellinghamgolfer.com.