Keeping Tiger involved will be important for right now, but is that really an incentive for the Cup long-term. Is another Tiger going to emerge that transcends the game to such a point that as you say double the amount of people watch when he is playing. That might be a reason to keep it around right now, but what next?

The only way to do that is to have big prize money at the end with a lot of people competing for it. Otherwise you have a five month golf season for the top players, April to August during the Majors season. No corporate tour sponsor wants that short of a season. Without the FedEx Cup, Tiger plays overseas for appearance checks and shows up in the US for maybe 8 weeks a year. (See Phil announcing today he’ll be playing in the upcoming Singapore Open). Instead they had Tiger from March through September, at least two more months and 6-8 more tournaments. If the FedEx Cup were killed as you suggest, the big non-major tournaments would continue to only have prize money as an incentive to draw players, and they’d have a much easier time growing the pots than the smaller tournaments, and advertisers would jump ship from the smaller tournaments when the players do, or vice versa. You should know that something doesn’t have to be an overwhelming logical success with the fans to stick around (see “BCS”).

I don’t know how something that gets a national 3.3 rating during a September Sunday afternoon is a failure. That’s almost 4 million households. So somebody cares. The events that Tiger missed last year had about half the ratings as when he was playing. So the tour has no problem giving him $10MM at the end…that’s a pittance for his continued participation throughout the year.

Keep in mind that sports are a business, so you need to think of them as one. Fans are only as important as a role to entice advertisers, not to judge their satisfaction of when it’s worth to watch Tiger or not, as Americans have shown we don’t care what he’s playing in…if he’s playing, we’ll watch.