An incredible moment from Sunday’s Tour Championship.

A post in the forums by GolfBookie has given me the kick in the pants I needed to offer my latest solution for “fixing” the FedEx Cup:

Drop the whole impossibly convoluted points thing. After the regular season is over, the top 140 get into the first round. After that, the field is reduced to 70. From the second round on, there’s no cut, but at the end of the second Sunday, the top 45 go on to the third round. After the third round, the field is cut to 22. The final tournament then would be a seeded (based on average finish in the previous three rounds) double elimination match play event.

In my mind, this solves two fundamental problems:

First, it gets rid of the points. If your playoff system takes a mathematician to explain, it’s no good. My head swims whenever I see a guy on The Golf Channel tell me that Player A wins the Cup if he finishes no lower than second, and Players B, C and D finish in a tie for third or worse—but that if Player E finishes eleven or higher and A through E finish T12 or worse, E wins. I can’t follow it. No one can follow it. It sucks.

Second, it makes the playoffs a real playoff. In the NFL, MLB, NBA, etc. playoffs, a team that doesn’t win is out. Period. There’s no system where you lose, but because you won by fifty points the previous week, your team still moves on. Lose, and you’re out. Drastic reduction of the field, with no points cushion increases the tension and increases the imperative to win.

I’m sure that the current system has been primarily to satisfy the need of advertisers to have stars in the field. But I think the Tour is missing a subtle point here: playoffs MAKE stars. Other sports are full of examples of good players who became Superstars with a legendary playoff run. A similar thing could happen to players in a wide open golf playoff.

Creating stars is a big problem for the Tour in the post Tiger era. As it is, the FedEx Cup just calcifies the current priority system. Think how terrific the buzz would be if the 140th ranked player fought his way through three rounds of drastic cuts, then worked his way into position on the final weekend. That’s possible under the current system, but with the points, quite unlikely.

Take a look at this graphic from NOAA, and you’ll see that the PGA Tour’s Barclays is in trouble.

Advice to the players: Don’t ground the club before putting.

Advice to the PGA Tour: Schedule 36 holes for Friday, and finish Saturday.

Here’s what’s wrong with the FedEx Cup playoffs: Of the 124 players who made the playoffs, 87 will move on to the second round regardless of their finish this week. That’s not so much a playoff as a procession.

Of course, there’ll be some jockeying for position. A higher finish puts a player in better position for the event two weeks from now. Players outside the ten or so need to finish high to have a chance, points wise to win the big prize.

There also are some big name players on the outside looking in. But there’s just not enough uncertainty. I think it’s uncertainty that makes playoffs in other sports so potent. Once the playoffs begin in football and baseball, any team could make a run.

With the FedEx Cup, it’s already possible to project who will be in the Top 30. According to the PGA Tour website, Nick Watney, Steve Stricker, Webb Simpson, Luke Donald, Keegan Bradley, Phil Mickelson, K.J. Choi, and Bubba Watson are locks. That’s like saying that the Pittsburgh Steelers are automatically in the playoffs—regardless of what they do—and the other teams are playing for the remaining spot.

I’d like to see a fifty percent attrition rate in each round of the playoffs—and a point system geared to ensure that only the top ten automatically move on to the next round. Further, we shouldn’t know who’ll be in the final field until the week before.

For the curious, a chart of which players automatically progress—and how high the others have to finish to move on—follows:

The Barclays currently is the first leg of the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup Playoff Series. Held this year at the Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, New Jersey, the tournament is open to the top 125 FedEx Cup points leaders following the Wyndham Championship the previous week. Following this tournament, the new points are allocated (five times that of a regular tournament) and the new top 100 will go on to round two at the Deutsche Bank Championship.

The tournament moves to the Plainfield, New Jersey, Country Club in 2011, and may return to its original home in Westchester New York in 2012.

The Barclays began in 1967 as the Westchester Classic. It was held at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York from 1967 to 2007. The site was so well known that even as the sponsors changed, it was just known as “The Westchester.”

The Westchester’s traditional spot was either the week before (even years) or the week after (odd years) the US Open. It was relocated on the calendar in 2007 in the great FedEx Cup shakeup.

Vijay Singh has won the event four times.

The players tee off between 9 am and 11:20 am, but NBC’s coverage runs from 1:30 to 6 pm. The Golf Channel covers the event from 11:30 to 1:30. So the whole thing apparently will be on tape delay.

Not worth watching unless its live, IMHO.