2008 FedEx Cup Playoffs Provide an Anticlimactic Finish

Handing Vijay Singh the FedEx Cup on national television while Anthony Kim, Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia and Camilo Villegas were still battling it out for the Tour Championship title certainly wasn’t the outcome PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem was looking for out of the 2008 FedEx Cup playoffs. 

Finchem made a short speech, which he had two weeks to prepare after Vijay locked up the FedEx Cup title at the BMW Championship, looking as if he couldn’t decide whether he was embarrassed or downright angry about how this much publicized FedEx Cup playoffs series had played out in its second year of existence.

Vijay took the FedEx Cup trophy in his hands looking as if he was extremely uncomfortable even accepting the trophy and the $10 million check after finishing in 22^nd place, 15 strokes behind the eventual winner. Villegas defeated Garcia on the first hole of a sudden-death playoff.

Vijay held up the trophy with an awkward smile while Finchem was counting down the seconds until this embarrassing moment on national television would end, so he could run for his corporate jet and head back to the PGA Tour headquarters in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

He probably called an emergency Sunday-night meeting to ream out everyone and anyone who was responsible for concocting this ridiculous idea of a FedEx Cup playoff system. 

Executives from Federal Express and the PGA Tour who were responsible for this atrocity of a PGA Tour Playoff were likely seen walking out of their offices this morning carrying all their belongings in large brown boxes and saying to themselves “I thought I would have been okay for now….I don’t even work on Wall Street.”

Yesterday’s conclusion to the Tour Championship was indeed exciting, but not because it was the final FedEx Cup playoff event. 

Most of those watching the tournament probably didn’t even remember that the Tour Championship was the final installment of the FedEx Cup series until the desperate attempts of NBC commentators to persuade the audience that it was actually exciting to see who won the race for second place in the FedEx Cup playoffs.

Yesterday’s conclusion to the Tour Championship was exciting in a way that any other big tournament is exciting.  There were several big name players battling it out for the win on the final day.  The Tour Championship was as exciting as the Players Championship or some of other big-name/strong-field tournaments such as the World Golf Championship events. 

Despite being the final event in the FedEx Cup playoff series, the Tour Championship didn't even sniff the excitement seen at a major championship and was trumped in stature when compared to last week's Ryder Cup. 

Last year the PGA Tour and Federal Express were extremely lucky that Tiger Woods happened to win the final FedEx Cup event, allowing them to avoid an awkward moment similar to what we all saw on Sunday evening when Vijay was handed the cup despite finishing 22^nd out of a field of 30 players.

That is despite the fact that Woods did essentially have the FedEx Cup title wrapped up heading into last year’s Tour Championship even after deciding to sit by his pool in Windermere, Fla., instead of attending the inaugural FedEx Cup event, yet another embarrassing notch on the belt of this two-year-old PGA Tour playoff debacle. 

Similar to a government initiative, the concept of the FedEx Cup was essentially a good idea but the execution of that concept was extremely poor.

This article could turn into a book if all the fundamental problems with the current FedEx Cup playoff format were described in detail, but here are just a few.

1)  144 players make the FedEx Cup playoffs; that is three-fourths of the PGA Tour.  That would be the equivalent to ¾ of teams in every single NFL division making it into the playoffs.

2)  You need a master's degree in mathematics from Harvard University to understand the FedEx Cup points system. “Vijay Singh is 11,212 points ahead of Sergio Garcia”…okay…what in the world does that mean?

3)  The winner of the FedEx Cup is unlikely to be the winner of the final playoff event. That would be equivalent to the winner of the Lombardi Trophy being unlikely to be the team that wins the Super Bowl. 

4)  The excitement was not infrequent, sporadic or irregular during the FedEx Cup playoffs, it was nonexistent. There is no dramatic climax to the playoffs. It is equivalent of an NFL playoff with no Super Bowl, a MLB playoffs with no World Series or a NCAA Final Four with no National Championship game.    

Hopefully, Tim Finchem was embarrassed enough on Sunday that he will go back to his office and began cleaning house of anyone who had a hand is the monumental failure the FedEx Cup playoffs have become.

He should start from scratch to devise a playoff format that will actually draw the interest of even the most diehard golf fans.