It's time to comprehend the new Playoffs points structure

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JERSEY CITY, N.J. -- It has been there in the fine print all season long. In fact, it wasn't even buried in fine print. It was front and center when the PGA TOUR first announced its restructuring of the FedExCup points system last November. No one tried to hide it; it was one of the significant changes proudly unveiled.

But only now does it seem to be dawning on people that the FedExCup title will truly be up for grabs when the PGA TOUR Playoffs for the FedExCup reaches its final destination next month at East Lake. Only now is the impact of the new points system finally sinking in, that you can't clinch the FedExCup title simply by how you perform in the first three Playoffs events.

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THE TOUR Championship presented by Coca-Cola is much like any championship match -- Super Bowl, Game 7, whatever. It will decide the winner of the Playoffs. It will not be a 72-hole make-sure-I-avoid-food-poisoning-and-sign-my-card-correctly run to the title that Vijay Singh enjoyed last year.

Like the New England Patriots in 2007, a golfer can theoretically win every TOUR event during the regular season and the first three Playoffs event, yet not clinch the championship. The Patriots couldn't beat the Giants and didn't win the Super Bowl, so they weren't the champs.

If you rank in the top five when points are reset after the third event of the Playoffs, the BMW Championship, then you control your own fate at East Lake, but you won't be able to waltz to the crown. And if you rank between 6-10, then you still have a very good shot at the FedExCup title. Pretty simple.

So, for example, if Tiger Woods -- certainly golf's version of the Patriots dynasty -- wins The Barclays this week as well as the next two events, he may still have to win at East Lake to claim the FedExCup title. Presented with that scenario Wednesday after his pro-am round, Woods issued neither a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

"It is different," Woods said. "You want to put more weight at the end of the season, which they are trying to do, trying to make it a little more interesting. They have changed the system twice and now it's the third time changing. Hopefully this will work. We'll see what happens."

Why this seems to be coming to light now is a bit of a mystery. Or rather, it just seems like people failed to comprehend back in November exactly why the points system was changed. It was to create a build-up of excitement through the Playoffs, with the drama hitting its crescendo at East Lake.

That doesn't mean the Regular Season and the first three Playoffs events are minimized, especially since there is no reset of points until prior to THE TOUR Championship.

Woods, as the No. 1 seed, won't be as negatively impacted by a poor performance this week as, say, the 125th and last seed, Troy Matteson, who must play well just to advance to next week's Deutsche Bank Championship. But FedExCup points are raised significantly in the Playoffs (2,500 to the winner this week as opposed to 600 for majors and 500 for most other Regular Season TOUR events), which means Tiger may not be the top seed going into TPC Boston. He currently leads Steve Stricker by 1,276 points.

"We wanted the finale, THE TOUR Championship, to be something where if you had the No. 1 seed, you sort of had something akin to a home-court advantage in, let's say NBA basketball," PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem said. "You can lose, but you've got an advantage. I think the intervals that we set for that first seed provides you an advantage."

Yes, the possibility exists that a player could win the FedExCup title without winning a single Playoffs event. Just how probable or improbable that is will be determined in the next few weeks when we see how the points play out. Even if it does happen, then it will mean a player has finished consistently near the top of the leaderboard.

That may jibe with how you think a championship should be decided. It may not. But the FedExCup is just in its third season, and not even the game's top players know the correct formula.

"I'm not really sure which is best," Phil Mickelson said. "... I mean, there's a bunch of different ideas and so forth that we could have used, and we'll probably keep tweaking it until it settles in and seems to be working. And even then, I wouldn't be surprised if we tweaked it years from now.

"Augusta National gets tweaked every year and that place is a gem. I would imagine we keep tweaking it as we go and making it better."

The key, for now, is that we won't know until Sunday at THE TOUR Championship, 16 rounds from now, who will claim the FedExCup. Considering that we weren't able to enjoy such drama the last two years, that would seem to be a major improvement, right?

But even as the golfers are coming to grips with the new points system, their approach remains, at its root, pretty simple during the next four events.

"You play well at the right time," Woods said, "you should be all right."