The PGA Tour has deferred to the Ryder Cup, rescheduling the FedEx Cup Championship for the week after the Ryder Cup. It’s also given the players the week off leading into the Ryder Cup. That means there will be a two week break between the Western Open BMW and the Tour Championship.

That move also should get help to prevent players from taking a week off of the “playoffs” to rest.

I appreciate the Tour’s deference. Now if they would just give back the Western Open, stop dissing the Canadian Open and restore the BC, all would be right with the world.

In what surely is a sign of the apocalypse, Justin Timberlake will become the host of the TOUR’s Las Vegas event, which will be renamed the Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children Open.

The event actually was foretold by Nostradamus in his Prophecies, XIIth Century, XIV Quatrain:

By The Lake, The Timber Stood Tall;
Watching Over The Shrine
Light Soaring and Spinning; Falls Into Dark
Soon all earth will fall

You can develop your own interpretation, but the meaning is pretty clear to me.

The Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children Open, part of the TOUR’s Fall Series, will be played October 13-19, 2008, at TPC Summerlin over 72 holes with an official Pro-Am on Wednesday. The event will be televised on GOLF CHANNEL. As part of his involvement, Timberlake will play in the Wednesday celebrity pro-am and host a concert during tournament week.

The regular PGA Tour season is over, but professional golf’s “Silly Season”, and the King thereof, Fred Couples will return in two weeks with the LG Skins Game.  The Sporting News takes a look at Fred Couples’ return in what will be his first tournament since the Masters.

While everyone seems to focus on the top ten money earners, I think the bottom ten are much more interesting. Players in the top 125 of earnings keep their playing privileges next year. Those at 126 or higher get conditional status, or no status at all.

So here are ten players on either side cut line; five who just made it, and five who just missed. They’re not REALLY the bottom ten, or course. Those honors to go guys who were not taking the tour seriously this year—such as Guy Boros, Loren Roberts and Fuzzy Zoeller.

The five on either side of the cutline, however, are either breathing huge sighs of relief, or pulling their hair out for not having made just one more cut. So here they are:

Final Rank: Name, Events Played, Money Earned
120: Alex Cejka, 25, $868,303
121: Ryan Armour, 32, $862,979
122: Kevin Na, 27, $856,669
123: Jeff Maggert, 26, $845,585
124: Kevin Stadler , 31, $810,876
125: Mathias Gronberg, 31, $785,180
126: Ben Curtis, 25, $772,321
127: Ted Purdy, 33, $758,734
128: Craig Kanada, 34, $743,305
129: Joe Durant, 28, $723,599
130: Brett Quigley, 25, $717,411

At the beginning of the season, the Tour had calculated that the winning number was going to be around $700,000. But they obviously were way off. I’m sure that guys like Curtis, Durant and Quigley thought they were safe.

According to the Tour site, nine players who started the “Fall Series” otuside the Top 125 managed to play their way into it in the tournaments following the Tour Championship. These included Kevin Stadler, George MacNeill, Daniel Chopra, Jesper Parnevik, Michael Allen, Mark Hensby and Mathias Gronberg

ESPN’s Bob Harig reports that the PGA Tour’s Fall Series is not doing very well. A telling sign:

At the Frys.com Open in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, general admission was just $5, and yet estimates put attendance for the week at less than 11,000 spectators. In Scottsdale, Ariz., at the Fry’s Electronics Open, less than 30,000 attended for the week, with just over 5,000 at the final round. Remember, this is a market that traditionally attracts more than 100,000 spectators on a single day to the FBR Open.

All of the events are on the Golf Channel, because the PGA Tour knew it was fruitless to put golf events on network television during football season.

Its going to be hard to make the fall finish relevant to the average fan, since the top players generally won’t be playing.

I’m beginning to think that they should just end the whole thing after the Tour Championship. Football is in full swing by then, and even a huge golf fan like the GolfBlogger gets distracted when his alma mater is playing on Saturday and his fantasy football players are in action on Sunday.

Here’s an idea. How about giving automatic tour cards to the Top 100 and ties, and then expanding Q School?

Who had the better year: Tiger or Lorena Ochoa

An interesting bit from Doug Ferguson notes that the PGA Tour seriously underestimated the amount of money that it would take to keep a tour card this year. Tour officials originally estimated that it would take $700,000 to stay in the top 125; the actual number is going to be north of $150,000.

“I was surprised,” said Andy Pazder, the tour’s vice president of competition. “We saw something in the $700,000 range, and that number has come and gone. It’s moving toward $750,000 and beyond. I can’t explain it without having analyzed some things.”

I can venture a guess as to what’s happened. The FedEx Cup series redistributed the money. Most of the big money players quit for the year after the FedExCup, leaving more for the second tier guys. Those guys now are competing for purses without having the dozen or so “automatics” suck up the cash in every tournament.

So, in a sense, the Tour’s plan is working. The Fall Series is more interesting precisely because of the reshuffling of the tour cards.