Is he a John Daly or a Shaun Micheel?
I say in between, but closer to Daly. I think he’s got some game. Bloodlines, too. He’s the nephew of Pat Bradley, six time LPGA major winner.
And Stevie backed up his win last week with a solid 7th place today.
For a bunch of journeyman at the top of the leaderboard, I thought the last nine holes was riveting. Jason Dufner and Keegan Bradley were both trending on twitter. so much for needing a certain player to move the needle. I am very happy that Keegan won, a fellow Vermonter. He is a rookie on the PGAT, not surprising that he has had some indifferent results.
He has basically clinched Rookie of the Year and is the front runner for Player of the Year.
Dufner was 4 up with 4 to play. He will have trouble sleeping for a while. He will be replaying the last 4 in his mind ,over and over.
He was actually 5 strokes ahead after Keegan tripled 15 while Dufner was on the 15th tee. Dufner bogeyed 15,16,17 (a good bogey on 15 after dunking t-shot). And Keegan birdied 16 and 17.
Bradley won the first major he ever qualified to enter. He should quit now.
Fred Couples selects Tiger Woods for Presidents Cup team - ESPN Couples selected Tiger for the presidents Cup in Australia. This could open him up for criticism if the Americans lose and Tiger gets creamed.
Gee,lets hope tigger doesn’t get opened up for criticism.That would be bad.
How can anyone blame Couples? The potential upside with Tiger is FAR greater than the potential upside of the #12 ranked American player on the PGA tour, whoever that is.
If Tiger is healthy by Ryder Cup time, he’d be a much greater asset to the team than anyone else Couples could have picked.
It’s just an exhibition anyway. Most Americans would rather see Tiger play than anyone else, and for the rest of the world, it’s probably more like 10 to 1.
The TV networks care about how many people tune in, and they DEFINITELY wanted TIger playing for the sake of ratings.
I’m pretty sure Fred Couples doesn’t care about that in the least. He wants the U.S. team to win. He figures that, if Tiger Woods is healthy by Ryder Cup time, he’ll be ONE of the best players in the world, even if he’s no longer head and shoulders above anybody else. That makes him a better choice than MANY guys who had more points this past season.
The ratings are going to be tiny, no matter if TW plays or does not play. The event is Australia, with a 14? hour time difference. The matches will be shown on tape delay against College Football and NFL Football. The only people that will watch are the golf fans, and the golf fans will watch no matter what. The Fringe fans (aka Tiger Woods fans) are not going to tune away from football to watch a golf event that results are already known.
I don’t know why I kept saying “Ryder Cup” when it’s the Prresident’s CUp we’re talking about.
Sorry- wasn’t paying close enough attention to what I was reading or writing.
Tiger is supposed to be healthy. He just is not playing well. Couples wants Tiger to play a couple tournaments before the cup. I think Tiger believes the weekly tournaments are beneath him.
Don’t blame Tiger; that’s the way the season was designed. The top pros are supposed to be done after the FedEx Cup. That’s why winning a Fall Finish event doesn’t get you an invitation to the Masters.
As for Tiger not playing well, that’s only true by his standards. His official ranking is more due to inactivity than poor performance. If you compute his average WGR points per event over the last two years, he’s higher than all but about five or six Americans, and about 15th in the world. The reason his official rank is so low is because they divide his point total by 40, the minimum divisor, even though he’s only played 30 events in the last two years.
Number 11 on the PC points list, Ricky Bieber, has played MUCH worse than Tiger over the last two years. Even sitting out two majors this year, Tiger has had four top 4’s in majors since hydrantgate; Fowler has had one top ten in his life, and only two top 35’s. Tiger has missed two cuts in the last two years; Fowler has missed 14. Yes, he plays more often than Tiger, but not seven times as often. Not even twice as often.
Its a fallacy that Tiger ranking is plummeting because of “inactivity” The fact is that Tiger has not finished better than 4th in any PGATournament, has been unable to string two good rounds together since the hydrant. TW missed 6 tournaments because of the alleged knee/achilles this summer. He earned a total of 38 OWGR ranking points in those 6 tournaments in 2010. If you added in those 38 points he would be barely in the top 20. He has lost more spots in the rankings due to poor play than he has inactivity. The facts is that the tournaments that are impacting his ranking the most is a 2nd place in a 18 man field Silly season event which he choked away and a Masters, which he could not finish the round after an outstanding 9 holes on Sunday.
How about the missed cuts fallacy? Tiger has played in 6 tournaments this year that actually had a cut. He missed the cut in one of them. He would have missed the cut in the TPC, he WD be after being plus 6 after nine holes, and there is a chance that he would have missed the cut at Bridgestone if it was a full field PGAT event. He wasn’t even close at the PGA. 6 shots.
right now, depending on how the next month plays out, my Prez Cup picks would be for Keegan Bradley and Gary Woodland. Two players that were behind the 8 ball before the season began because they didn’t play on the Tour last year. 2010 events count 1x, 2011 events count 2x. Keegan Bradley should be automatically qualified, as of right now he is the leading candidate for Player of the year. I don’t know how the Probable PoY can not be qualified for the team. Woodland can be bumped by a another player who might have a good playoffs.
I think it is time the PGAT started to take the eggs out of the TW basket. He is a bridge to the past and right now, he is just another player on tour. It aint the injuries fault that he missed the playoffs. He “Mailed it in” on the weekend at Torrey Pines. he couldn’t find the planet on the 19th hole against Thomas Bjorn in the matchplay. All he needed was 18 more FE points to make playoffs.
And the 8 tournament fallacy? he was healthy when he skipped Sony, when he skipped Hope, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Honda, Tampa, and Houston. he chose not play those events. It was not an injury issue. and he chose not to play Wyndham.
FWIW, Rickie Fowler is not 11th on the Prez Cup points list. going into this week, he is 12th and headed to 13th after Snedeker’s probable 3rd place finish today,
Possibly 14th if Jonathan Byrd finishes the last two holes birdie - birdie.
And I would not be picking him, but he is much higher than TW on my list.
No, it isn’t. He will plummet even faster now that he’s out of the playoffs. In a month, he’ll be down to 26 events played in the WGR window, but his divisor will still be 40. That means that his official average will be almost twice as low as his actual average.
LOL. To think that Tiger would miss two majors over an “alleged” injury is right up there with the birthers and the fake moon landings.
But adding in those events would have been enough to get him into the FedEx Playoffs, where he did very well last year. Not well enough to overcome starting from near the bottom of the qualifiers, but well enough to help his ranking.
No, he hasn’t. Even if you start from #1, he’d be around 15th if they used the actual divisor, rather than the minimum divisor. That’s a loss of 14 spots due to performance. Since he’s currently ranked 36th, he’s lost 22 spots to inactivity.
The top golfers in the world played in both of those events, and I’m pretty sure that Tiger had the best combined performance in them. So I don’t understand the sneer. No, he didn’t win them, but neither did anyone else except for two players.
That is horrible by Tiger’s standards. That is not remarkable at all by normal standards, including world class players. And I repeat my chuckle if you don’t think his WD was for a legitimate injury, which had him on crutches for a month, and made him miss two majors.
I thoroughly agree with Bradley being the other pick. The only thing I can say for Woodland is he would be a better pick than Fowler.
I’m sure that Tiger is almost as mad as you about missing the playoffs, but he didn’t plan on getting injured at the Masters, and reinjured at the Players. If he could go back in time and change something, I can think of a few things that would be ahead of playing the Hope and the Honda.
No matter how you slice it, Tiger did not qualify for the Presidents Cup. His play has been poor. He has missed a lot of time and is not sharp. He ought to play every event he can to get his game back, assuming he can.
All I can say is I hope he does. He says his knee is healthy now; he has had more time to get used to his new swing; and he has a state of the art practice facility in his back yard. I expect him to have a much sharper short game by November, and that plus distance control is really all he needs to be on top again. Driving better would be nice, but he’s been driving erratically since 2003, and he played some of the most consistently excellent golf the world has ever seen in 2005-9.