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Saudi World Golf Tour 2022/2023 Thread

Guessing the Ryder Cup and President's Cup heads wouldn't be fans of having an important match play event the weekend before their event.
 
Golf is a funny game. Hottest two guys all year have been Koepka and DeChambeau, then in the championship they're both like in last place.
 
Match play would be awesome, it's just awful for TV. Plus when one match has 3 birdies total and someone advances, while another match has 12 birdies and someone gets eliminated, it always feels unfair. The Ryder Cup is a perfect match play scenario because the team format allows for points and no single match is too important.

I think a mid-tourney pod system with match play would be awesome, but hard to implement. Everyone at this level is capable of a low round that single-elimination match play just becomes too arbitrary.

How about a cumulative under par total across all 3 events?
 
How about a cumulative under par total across all 3 events?

You check out what that would look like this year? Discounting the complexity of players making the finals with a skipped event or a missed cut in those 3 events, you run into a soft course playing easy and suddenly Bryson is starting at -46 on a course where fewer than 10 players are on pace to get to even 10 under. Right now he'd have a 10 stroke lead on Justin Rose despite being in 2nd to last and Rose leading because it was rainy during the playoffs. No thanks.

This is what the past has proved. A true season long points race that can be decided before you even tee it up at East Lake is lame and nobody cares about it, least of all the players. Making East Lake matter but turning it into what it is now - an absurd statistics exercise akin to election night that not a single player on the course understands or knows about - is also lame despite fixing the problem of top players not showing up. That was the main thing to fix and they fixed it, to their credit.

So those changes are set in stone - tour champ has to be tied to the Cup, and some type of adjustment/reset/handicap has to be made to keep things interesting. Given those two facts, I think it's far simpler and more interesting to replace points with strokes. I'd probably prefer, maybe like you, that they consider tweaking format. Tons of amateur tourneys have a couple rounds of stroke play that determine a match play field - there's nothing to say they can't flip that, especially since you have 3 tourneys leading up to the final to narrow the field anyway.

If it were me I'd have 60 make the final, 3 days of match play in pods of 4 seeded by FedEx rank to get to 30, then 2 days of stroke play winner takes all. Or keep it 4 days and have a day of 36 holes during the match play - if a WGC event can do that why can't the tour championship for $10M...
 
Tiger switches to a black Nike shirt featuring a Kaepernick silhouette on the back! Just kidding, but that would be amazing.
 
Yes, they are zoysia.

For those who have never played zoysia, find a good course with it and play it. The ball sits up in the fairway like it's on a small tee. For sweepers like me, it's amazing
 
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