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WGC-Match Play: Pool Play Needs to be Eliminated

By Richie Randolph

AUSTIN, TEXAS - MARCH 28: Billy Horschel of the United States celebrates with the Walter Hagen Cup after winning 2&1 against Scottie Scheffler of the United States in the final round of the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play at Austin Country Club on March 28, 2021 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)
AUSTIN, TEXAS - MARCH 28: Billy Horschel of the United States celebrates with the Walter Hagen Cup after winning 2&1 against Scottie Scheffler of the United States in the final round of the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play at Austin Country Club on March 28, 2021 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images) /
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The WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play has many elements that make it a top-tier event. It is hosted at the beautiful Austin Country Club and it’s WGC status guarantees the worlds’ top players will show up. The match play format also adds intrigue and provides a different flair to the normal stale professional golf circuit (which I have previously written about). All of these positives highlight how ridiculous and unnecessary it is to include a ‘Group Stage’ aspect of the tournament.

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This WGC – previously sponsored by Accenture – went through a rough patch in the early 2010s, playing at vanilla courses in the greater Tucson area with a lack of exciting champions. In an attempt to mitigate this, the PGA Tour overhauled the event in 2015, moving to a different venue (initially at Harding Park before settling in Austin) and introducing ‘Pool Play’. This meant instead of a classic bracket where the #1 seed played the #64 seed, #2 played #63 etc., the players were split into 16 groups of 4. They played each golfer in their pod, ensuring everyone competed in at least 3 matches. This was a thinly veiled attempt to protect the top players and pray they advanced deeper in the event, hopefully setting up star-studded weekend matchups.

After five iterations of this format (with 2020 being cancelled due to COVID-19), it is obvious this idea is flawed. There has never been a tournament where more than two of the top fifteen seeds have advanced to the final four. Since Dustin Johnson won as the top seed in 2017, no one seeded higher than 32nd has claimed the Walter Hagen Cup. All the ‘Group Stage’ has done is dilute the product by eliminating the excitement of a single-elimination tournament and creating uninteresting matches. For example, last Friday, Collin Morikawa and Rory McIlroy (the #4 and 11 seeds, respectively), both played matches where they had no chance of advancing to the knockout stage. How exactly is that more exciting?

This of course stands in stark contrast with the best bracket in all of sports – March Madness – where multiple 1 seeds lost early in the tournament and Cinderella’s like UCLA and Oregon State are on the verge of history in the Elite Eight.

Next. WGC-Match Play: Winners and Losers from Austin. dark

The move to ‘Pool Play’ was a classic attempt by the PGA Tour to manipulate their tournament to protect the players and try to stack the deck so the top-ranked golfers advanced to the later rounds. This runs counter with the entire appeal of the match play format, where a player does not need to beat a hundred players but rather just one. After five years of this failed experiment, it is time to return to a classic single elimination tournament. The fans deserve more excitement, and what better way to do so than to force players to feel the pressure of ‘win or go home’ from the first shot.

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