Citing the current playoff structure and his busy late-season schedule, Rory McIlroy on Wednesday defended his decision to skip last week\u2019s playoff opener at the FedEx St. Jude Championship.<\/p>\n
McIlroy was the only player in the 70-man field who elected not to compete in the first of three playoff events at TPC Southwind. He didn\u2019t lose any ground in the standings, remaining at No. 2 heading into this week\u2019s BMW Championship, and is still unable to pass Scottie Scheffler for the top spot.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not as significant as in years\u2019 past, with the Tour announcing midway through the season that it was changing the format of the season finale, from a staggered-strokes start to a winner-take-all, 72-hole event.<\/p>\n
The top 5 players in the FedExCup standings after this week will receive at least a $1 million bonus, with Scheffler, at No. 1, slated to bank another $5 million.<\/p>\n
McIlroy\u2019s no-show in Memphis prompted much debate about the postseason format, with Peter Malnati, a player director on the PGA Tour policy board, telling reporters that he was \u201cvery concerned\u201d about arguably the Tour\u2019s biggest star missing one of the $20 million postseason events and that it was already looking into ways to close the loophole.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of discourse about should these playoffs be mandatory,\u201d McIlroy said Wednesday at the BMW Championship. \u201cObviously I didn\u2019t play last week, and is that something they need to look at? I\u2019ve heard this idea kicked around, where everything resets after Wyndham and then the top 70 just play for the top 50 spots to get into the next week, and then everything resets again here, and then the top 30 from this week then make it to the Tour Championship.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want to try to make it straight playoffs and elimination, I think that would be a good way to go. (But) you\u2019re trying to balance a lot of different things. You\u2019re trying to balance the competitive integrity of what the playoffs are, but you\u2019re also trying to keep the media rights partners happy, and you\u2019re trying to keep the sponsors happy \u2013 they\u2019re the people that are paying the big bucks and expect the big names to be playing in their golf tournaments, and that\u2019s a delicate balance.\u201d<\/p>\n
McIlroy said he still would have skipped last week\u2019s event even if a more severe punishment were in place and he fell, for instance, outside the top 30 in the standings. He said he is playing nine more events this year, including trips to the United Kingdom, India, Dubai and Australia, and wanted to give his 36-year-old body another week off. Being at his best for an away Ryder Cup and chasing a seventh Race to Dubai title are high on his priority list. <\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the guys aren\u2019t 18 years into their professional careers, either. I feel like I\u2019m in a little bit of a different position than some of the guys,\u201d he said. \u201cThat extra week off will do me good with the events coming up.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Citing the current playoff structure and his busy late-season schedule, Rory McIlroy on Wednesday defended his decision to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":143050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[1430,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-143049","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115022876132570537","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}