Rory McIlroy struggled badly at the FedEx St. Jude Championship last week.
McIlroy has only played in seven tournaments since his Masters win back in April, and three of those were major championships!
It was no surprise at all to see the 37-year-old from Northern Ireland struggle so badly at TPC Southwind last week.
Rory McIlroy looked completely disinterested during the first leg of the PGA Tour playoffs in Memphis.
The thing is, McIlroy lost nothing by playing so poorly. In fact, it won’t matter if he plays even worse at the BMW Championship this week at Bellerive either.
As long as he’s inside the top 30 on the FedEx Cup points list heading into East Lake, he will have a chance of winning the season-long points race.
And that just doesn’t feel right, nor is it fair.
PGA Tour told to create new rule which would’ve been terrible for Rory McIlroy this year
McIlroy’s light schedule in 2026 has been due to a lack of motivation to compete in regular PGA Tour events, but also the fact that his Masters win almost guaranteed him a place inside the top 30 come the end of the season.
Dan Rapaport has been speaking on his Dan on Golf Show about the PGA Tour playoffs and how they lack any kind of real excitement.
“This is the problem with the playoffs and the PGA Tour leadership know this,“ Rapaport explained.
“To have a playoff event, where so much of it, is who is going to make it and only one guy, Sungjae Im. He was the only guy who started outside the top 50 and moved in and Keith Mitchell was the only guy who started inside the top 50 and moved out. It’s not enough.
“They took one step in this direction last year when they wiped everything clean after the BMW and the Tour Championship became a tournament for $18m. But surely it would be better if it was 70 players advance and points are wiped clean.
“You give out bonuses at the end of the regular season. Then if you finish in the top 50 you move on, so Rory would be out, Akshay would be out. Then the top 30 move on to next week. Wouldn’t that be so much simpler to follow?“
That seems like a great solution to add more excitement and jeopardy to the PGA Tour playoffs.
McIlroy would have been eliminated from the playoffs had Rapaport’s suggestion been in place.
The thing is, though, he certainly wouldn’t have turned up to TPC Southwind having not swung a club in four weeks, had only the top 50 in the field qualified for the BMW Championship next week.
Alan Shipnuck gives his opinion on the problem with the PGA Tour playoffs
Golf writer Alan Shipnuck was a guest on Rapaport’s show, and he gave his take on the PGA Tour’s failed playoff format.
“We have been talking about this since the mid 2000s. They can never get it right. They can never get the volatility or sense of drama right,“ Shipnuck said.
“That is part of why Rory said I can just rock up and work on my game this week. I am going to the Tour Championship no matter what.
“He did the math. People who are hating on Rory, he understood the algorithm. There is just not enough volatility and drama. There is not enough sense of do or die, winner goes home. That is why calling it the playoffs has never worked. It’s really just bonus season.
“This is a three tournament way for guys to make money and for the Tour to have some kind of ending stretch to a long season. It’s not the playoffs and never has been. It’s just a series of tournaments with a weird scoring system nobody understands and someone is going to win a bunch of money and we have to pretend it’s a big deal.“
The other option to make things more exciting would be to change the format of the playoff to a cumulative scoring system.
That way, players like Rory McIlroy would not be able to coast through the first two playoff events safe in the knowledge that all he has to do is turn up to East Lake and play well at the Tour Championship to win the FedEx Cup.