At least Ollie Schniederjans has one shot he can blame. The others can only shrug at the short-sightedness of the PGA Tour.
Going into the first tournament of the FedEx Cup playoffs, starting Thursday with The Barclays at Plainfield Country Club in Edison, NJ, the headliner is Jordan Spieth, the 22-year-old who just ascended to No. 1 in the world. (The man he overtook, Rory McIlroy, is not playing.)
But the talk among those inside the ropes is about how the new, obtuse rules of the PGA Tour playoff system — and Presidents Cup points, which is run by the Tour — have begun to stifle the next generation of great players.
By eliminating the Fall Series events after the four-tournament playoffs and making them the start of the new season — the “wrap-around season” — and eliminating the PGA Tour Qualifying School, there are few ways for young players to earn full status on the Tour.
Schniederjans had a good chance, but the 22-year-old out of Georgia Tech, who turned pro shortly after finishing tied-12th at the Open Championships at St. Andrews in July, made a bogey on his 36th hole at the Wyndham Championship last week and missed the cut by one shot. Had he made par — or finished one stroke better at any of the previous three tournaments he played in — he would have earned a spot in the Web.com Tour playoffs with a chance to earn his PGA Tour card for next season. Now, he has no status anywhere.
“Everything I put in and all those weeks and the grind and the stress,” Schniederjans told GolfChannel.com, “and then to miss it by one, is just brutal.”
Brooks Koepka, 25, came out of Florida State in 2014, and instead of playing the Web.com Tour, chose to split time between the European Tour and PGA Tour, where there’s significantly more money, better fields and better experience. He made enough money during his time in the States to earn special temporary membership on the PGA Tour — with two top-5 finishes, including a tied-4th at the US Open — but none of his FedEx Cup points from those tournaments count towards the Presidents Cup standings because he wasn’t considered a full-time member of the PGA Tour.
Koepka is now ranked 16th in the standings for the 12-man team to be picked in two weeks (only the top 10 automatically make the team) and is likely to need a captain’s pick to make it — this despite being ranked 16th in the world and after having won the Phoenix Open earlier this year.
Patrick Rodgers, 23, might be the worst off of the bunch. He came out of Stanford this summer and turned a handful of sponsor’s exemptions into full-time status on the PGA Tour for next season by finishing in the Top 125 in the FedEx Cup standings. That should have gotten him into the playoffs, but he can’t participate in the big-money events because he’s not a member of the Tour — yet. And he can’t play in the Web.com Finals events because of a recent rules change that disallows PGA Tour members of any status to cherry-pick their events.
So Rodgers, one of the bright young stars of the Tour, has almost a full two months off from playing in the States.
Oh, and Martin Kaymer, the 2014 US Open champion, also won’t be allowed to play more than 12 events on the PGA Tour next season because he only played 13 this season — two short of minimum of 15 to retain membership. (He could have fulfilled the obligation by making the playoffs, but missed out.) Odds are he will now play more on the European Tour, where he held membership, as well.
So new European Tour head Keith Pelley’s idea to join forces with the Asian Tour to rival the purses of PGA Tour — well, that’s starting to look like a good proposal. PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem was the mastermind behind all of this, and his contract is up in 2016.