PGA Tour’s offseason is here
Hello and welcome to the PGA Tour’s offseason.
Other than the 24 players who competed in the Hero World Challenge and this week’s Franklin Templeton Shootout (one of the last remaining survivors of what was known as the tour’s “Silly Season”), the offseason is about six weeks off for the standard run-of-the-mill PGA Tour player.
Players who won events in the 2014-15 tour season can play in Hawaii Jan. 7-10 in the Tournament of Champions, but not all the great ones do, so the offseason is extended a bit more. The first full-field event of 2106 is Jan. 14-17 in the Sony Open in Hawaii.
It is a strange situation the folks in Ponte Vedra, Fla., have created with the wrap-around season concept. Instead of the tournament season ending after the Tour Championship for most players, the fall season has been added.
A series of six events make up that group with all of those making 500 FedEx Cup points available to the winner. This was unashamed attempt by the tour to entice some of the big names to play in the fall, but very few of the top 10 have taken the bait.
The big boys are going to take their time off, regardless of the points enticements. They know they’re good enough to get themselves in good position for the FedEx Cup playoffs without playing in the fall.
And that leaves us with the interesting part of the situation. The six tournaments in the fall are great for the young guys out there, like the top 25 from last year’s Web.com season who earned spots on the PGA Tour this year. Under the old system, these players would have had to struggle for starts after the first of the year.
Three of those Web.com grads won tournaments this fall: Emiliano Grillo, Smylie Kaufman and Peter Malnati. That’s great for them and they’ve put themselves in a good position when the rigor of the tour season begins in January.
But there’s another group that’s been affected by the wraparound. And this is a large group, one that would be considered the rank-and-file of the tour. Not exactly the grunts out there, but a group that doesn’t feature many recent major champions or guys who play in many World Golf Championship events.
These are the guys out there seemingly every week, trying their best to play well enough to keep their cards and if they get hot on the greens for a week, maybe make a serious run at a win.
But when things don’t go well, however, the pressure starts to build.
Guys like Boo Weekley find themselves in a position of having to playing more, instead of necessarily wanting to play. Most of them would take more time off if they could, but feel like they can’t afford to.
“Honestly, this wraparound season sucks,” Weekley said recently. His viewpoint is shared by a lot of those in that rank-and-file group.
They know that it’s an annual scramble for every last FedEx Cup point as the season ends and it makes sense to them that getting additional points now will be much more beneficial than lounging around at home and risking FedEx Cup pressure next July and August.
It’s an interesting dynamic that is growing on the PGA Tour, one that figures not to go away any time soon. Sponsors are lining up to get their names on one of the 46 PGA Tour events so don’t expect the number of events to decrease.
But all of this is said not to create sympathy for these guys who are out there playing outstanding layouts for million-dollar purses week after week.
It’s just a reminder there’s more to life on the tour than what Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, Jason Day and Rickie Fowler are doing at the top of the world rankings.
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