PGA Tour 2015: The Wrap Season Is A Necessity
By Les Bailey
Most golf purists I talk to, and read around the internet don’t like the PGA Tour and its Wrap Around Season, but it is a necessity, and needed here in the good old USA. Most say that if the European Tour can keep up a calendar year schedule and playoff system, why can’t we? The reason is Football. I know it’s difficult at times to follow, but it has its good points, and then there are some drawbacks.
The PGA Tour needs to have their season wrapped up, and the playoffs over by the time the college teams, and NFL schedule get into mid-season form.
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As a writer who has analytics on my site, I can confirm that after the PGA Championship, fans are watching Major League Baseball playoffs, NASCAR’s end of season schedule, and lots of football. Only die-hard golf fans like us, are watching PGA Tour golf on television.
It’s so bad now, ESPN doesn’t spend any time covering golf, unless Tiger Woods does something. We saw very little network coverage of the Race To Dubai Championship, and only got finals coverage of the Hero World Championship because of , you know who was guaranteed to play in the final rounds.
The 2014 Ryder Cup got very little coverage on anything other than the Golf Channel because people had to get up too early to watch it, or catch the mid-day reruns. Folks are not going to do that on a Saturday or Sunday morning and stand a chance of missing the latest news on their favorite college teams on Saturday, and the NFL pre-game shows on Sunday.
I like the wrap season because it gives younger, and lesser known players a chance to earn some money to keep them afloat financially, those all-important FedEx Cup points, and an invitation to Augusta.
In the past, those tournaments were hard to watch, and now it forces some of the better players into scheduling these events so they don’t get so far behind the 8-ball in FedEx Cup points that they could possibly miss the later playoff events, or the playoffs completely.
In the 2013-2014 season, a little-known, Jimmy Walker won enough points, and tournaments in the early going, he was able to hold on down the stretch, and earn a Ryder Cup berth.
The only place where it gets a little hard to keep up with, is the WGC-HSBC Championship played in Shanghai. The PGA Tour guys are playing for FedEx Cup points for the next season, and European Tour players are playing for current season Race To Dubai points, and ones who also play a regular schedule on the PGA Tour, get FedEx Cup points as well.
In a perfect world, everything would be on a clean schedule, but with most people having access to the Internet, it’s not all that hard to follow.
The LPGA Tour has a different demographic, and can go up against the football monster with limited fall-out. Sure, they lose some people during football games, but women who are interested in following the LPGA and are football fans as well, find a way to keep up.
The PGA Tour Wrap schedule is inconvenient for us fans, but I think it has made golf better for everyone involved.
With the regular part of the PGA Tour getting underway on Thursday in Hawaii, we won’t have to worry about it for another year. Then we’ll be talking about it again.