Move Over FedEx Cup Points: it’s UPS (Universal Points System) Time

As the professional game has evolved and existential threats have emerged, the PGA Tour has shifted from a non-profit model designed to benefit its playing members to a for-profit enterprise with outside investors (likely seeking some kind of return on their investment). The biggest structural changes in response to the threat of LIV’s big purse, no-cut events has been the introduction of their own set of limited field, big money no-cut events. More recently, they announced and approved changes to reduce field sizes and to the number of players keeping a tour card. The jury is still out whether these changes have made or will make the tour a more compelling fan experience. 

One can’t help wonder if the “closed-shoppiness” of these recent tour changes are reactionary and motivated by PAC members looking to protect their own status and playing opportunities, rather than proactively driving towards a vision that will create long-run franchise value for the PGA Tour, its members and its new investors. 

Visionary thinking requires first setting a vision and then evaluating every decision on whether it moves the tour closer to that vision or further away from it. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that visionary thinking is not the Tour’s strongest suit (I mean, we had three different names for Signature events in a 12-month period.)

In my mind, truly putting the fans first will generate the most long-run value to the tour, providing financial and golf benefits to all of its playing members. And what fans truly value is seeing golf skill displayed at the highest level. We want to see golfers battling down the stretch matching great shot for great shot, doing things with a golf ball that we can only imagine. We want to see professionals hone their craft, continue to develop and have breakthrough performances.  And yes, while it’s a star-driven Tour, we do love a David vs. Goliath story just as well. 

Just mathematically speaking, the odds of a down-the-stretch shootout happening in any one event is more likely to occur with a larger field size than a smaller one. Scottie Scheffler reached golf heights that we haven’t seen since peak Tiger. Might those performance have been even more memorable if he battled two or three more golfers down the stretch?  Love LIV or leave it, that is what we are missing out on in this current bifurcated game.  Would Scottie’s season be viewed differently if he had faced Bryson and Jon Rahm in all those events?

It’s clear that the odds of a back-nine battle increase when you have the most skilled and deserving golfers all playing in the same event the same week (see the U.S. Open at Pinehurst).  And while we may still be light years away from a LIV/PGA Tour agreement, there are things that the tour has within its control, with the players on its tours and the assets it owns. For instance, many of the Tour exemption categories appear to be antiquated and in place to protect journeymen pros who are way past their prime. Might the tour product be more compelling if those spots were given to younger, up-and-coming players who have demonstrated they are playing at a higher skill level? Why should they need to wait until next season or, at best, a midseason battlefield promotion that only comes after three KFT wins?  Didn’t Matt McCarty demonstrate he could already play at a Tour level well before his third KFT victory?

At the center of all of this are the precious FedExCup points. The PGA Tour has long leaned on the FedEx Cup points system as its framework for ranking players, rewarding performances and trying to manufacture season-long drama. They effectively define which tier of the PGA Tour you fall into. Make into the Top 50 and you’re set for all the signature events the following year. Stay in the top 125 (soon to be 100) after the Fall season and you keep your Tour Card. The points races create some drama at these key end of season dates for the players just inside or outside the cut line. Though if you’re anything like me, it doesn’t really resonate when they show the updated FedEx Cup standings during the Amex in February. Mid-season, the FedEx points race rings hollow.

The Tour has an opportunity to fully maximize the franchise value of its tours by introducing a mega-Tour with more seamless movement of players between the PGA and the Korn-Ferry divisions and between the KFT and PGA Tour Americas. This vision goes in the complete opposite direction of a closed shop and towards a true meritocracy. One where you could look at every possible detractor with an authentic answer of “just play better”. One that might actually be doing that journeyman pro a service by creating the right incentives for them to hone their craft and work on their game as opposed to skating on their peak performance from years ago. 

In order for that to occur, you need a points system that is fungible and equitable across the tours, rather than the siloed, season-long points races that occur today. So with that, it’s out with the FedEx Cup points system. Enter the Universal Points System (UPS)—a bold, equitable, and meritocratic approach to seamlessly integrate the PGA Tour, KFT, and Americas tours into one cohesive ecosystem. This isn’t just a tweak to the old playbook—it’s a revolutionary new operating model designed to maximize long-term value for fans, players, and investors.

As we demonstrated in our last blog post, it’s not difficult to align the points systems across tours. Data Golf’s True Strokes Gained metric already controls for strength of field and performance relative to that field for a given round and given tournament. A +1 average True SG performance typically is good enough for a 3rd of 4th place finish on the Americas tour, but is more likely to lead to an 8th place finish on KFT. Do the same on the Tour and in a Signature event, and you’re likely to finish around 25th. In the current siloed points system, you’d earn 135-190 points in Americas, 85 points on KFT, 35.5 points on Tour and an (overly generous) 75 points for a signature event. It really doesn’t need to be this way. 

We studied the 12000+ player performances across the three tours in 2024 and aligned the points distribution to be as equitable as possible. First we started with the standard 500 point distribution on the Americas tour and then determined equivalent point totals for the other tours and event types, using True Stroke Gained performance binned into .25 increments from -4.5 to 4.5. Once the middle-pack finishes were aligned (where the bulk of performance occur), we went back and reassessed the points assigned to the top performers. This led to the winner for an Americas tour event going from 500 to 315. Winning an Americas tour event is just behind finishing third in a Korn Ferry event. Winning a KFT event is worth 650 points, which is roughly equivalent to finishing 8th in a regular tour event. This helped establish the points allocation for a tour win at 4000 points, and the other PGA Tour events followed the relative ordering discovered in our last blog post.

The other change is points are allocated based on finish position even for golfers who miss the cut, so truly every stroke matters. This is a departure from the current system that awards zero points for a missed cut across all the tours. This is a necessary step in the UPS because a -0.5 SG performance might miss a cut and get zero points on the PGA tour, but a similar -0.5 SG performance would mean around a 16th place finish and 53 points on the Americas tour. So we needed missed cuts on the bigger tours to still earn points in order to keep it equitable. 

The charts below show that the tours are closely aligned by SG performance. An equitable points distribution across tours is definitely achievable. 

Not your Grandaddy’s Tour: A True Relegation Model

Once the points are aligned, it provides the provides the perfect opportunity to shake up the Tour operating model into something much more exciting and dynamic. Players could move up or down across tours throughout the calendar year. We propose a UPS leaderboard that is updated weekly, taking a golfer’s 20-best performances over the last 52-week scoring period.

Instead of a FedEx Cup points board that is stale for much of the season, imagine a UPS leaderboard that is the constant currency of how the season is discussed in any given week. Imagine the storylines about what is at stake for players facing crucial putts to decide if they are in next week’s field or not. Imagine a Korn-Ferry player finding lightning in a bottle and climbing all the way into signature event status within a calendar year. All of these compelling storylines are possible with UPS. 

The recently completed FedEx Cup fall was fairly interesting this year with McCarty winning and players’ tour cards and some signature event status at stake at the RSM. But this system has a couple oddities. First of all, KFT finishes in early October and then the top 30 graduates don’t have a place to play until 2025, when the PGA Tour modelers tell them they *might* get in at Sony or Amex. And then you have Tour guys in the top 50 that have little to play for in the fall (they literally cannot accrue FedEx Cup points) as they are guaranteed signature event status through all of 2025. Why not have all of these guys jockeying for position throughout the fall?  Again, the chances of a compelling back-nine battle only increase with a deeper, high-quality field.  Spots 44-50 in the standings this year were Cameron Young, Austin Eckroat, Max Homa, Adam Hadwin, Max Greyserman, Nick Dunlap, and Eric Cole. Some are rising stars, some are guys barely hanging on. Let’s get them in the field and make them fight for their spot in next year’s signature events. 

Edge Cases

The UPS operating model could seamlessly allow for the different edge cases that occur throughout a PGA Tour season:

PGATourU: recent college grads would be seeded with a certain number of points that gives them the right status level (Tour card, KFT status, etc). The key is these seeded points would be spread out retroactively (say in 26 increments going back every two weeks), so a player would have to exceed this baseline performance level to keep the same status. Or they could earn points above their baseline level and move up in the rankings and potentially reach higher levels of status, seamlessly. 

PGATourU accelerated: the points system could work as-is with the same seeded points framework as above, but the Tour could also use shadow points to slot a player like Luke Clanton (who would be ranked 90th in UPS if included) and provide a path to professional golf for players who have proven they belong.

Q-School Grads and KFT Q School Finalists - similar to the PGATourU guys, they would be seeded with points to give them the desired starting point. Then they have to show up and perform. In the example of an Americas-level player making it to final stage and earning full KFT status, his seeded points would replace his earned points from the previous season. The bottom of the Americas tour who didn’t make it back through Q school would bottom out and effectively be replaced by the new Q school entries.

Major Medical - players points simply put on pause from rolling off until they can resume action, then the roll-off clock starts back up when they are healthy.

Sponsors Exemptions/Monday Q’s - both should continue to exist and offer spots into the fields. If anything, sponsor’s exemptions may need to be expanded because the exemption categories for career money list and 300 starts would be going away. Some of these ‘name’ players may still have some marketability, so let’s give the authority to the tournament directors to decide what’s best for their event. But that leads to the next concept…

Super Edge Case: The Legacy Leaderboard

I relent that there is still some value of having grizzled vets in tournament fields. Many have name recognition and can find that old spark given the opportunity. We are proposing a separate Legacy Leaderboard that would provide pathways into a tournament field. Basically a player would accumulate lifetime points and then could “spend” 20% of his lifetime points to be put on the legacy leaderboard. So essentially if this guy doesn’t improve he only gets to do this a few times before he’s no longer relevant. But he could use this opportunity to solidify his spot on the regular UPS standings. We imagine this feature would be used by someone too proud to dip down to KFT. Otherwise they can still try to sponsors exemption route. Either way, it’s a wrinkle to the operating model that creates some storylines and podcast fodder. 

UPS Worldwide

Once an equitable, SG-based points allocation has been established, you could use it to score events from other tours as well. So instead of 10 DP World Tour grads getting a tour card every year, players could slot in based on their performance and get a degree of status that is commensurate with their level of play. 

Oh, by the way, you could also do this to…rank LIV players! Yes, we’ve heard all of the arguments against why they couldn’t possibly be rated in OWGR, most of which are intellectually dishonest.  It’s actually quite easy to assign equitable points to their tournaments, accounting for the weaker fields (we just did it for Americas) and even account for the fact they are only 54 holes. This is not an unsolvable problem. Besides, didn’t the tours have a framework agreement in place over 18 months ago? Shouldn’t these parties be acting in good faith and play nice assuming it’s all going to come back together at some point? Golf is more interesting and the product is more compelling when guys like Bryson and Jon Rahm are in the field. Should anybody really care if they play in an occasional tour event outside their contractual LIV commitments? Last I checked, Bryson is probably looking for something to do now that he finally aced the shot over his house. Again, if we are making decisions based on an overarching fan-first vision, then we should calculate points for LIV players and allow the top players some access to tour events. 

A new Points System, a new Vision…a new Leader?

It was recently reported the Jay Monahan’s salary increased to $23 million for doing a job that most, even his constituents, have been critical of. The question that needs to be asked: is he the right guy to move the Tour into the future?

I know a guy who will do the job for half that number! Bam! I’ve instantly made an impact to SSG’s bottom line. First on the expense side, and then next through the phenomenal growth that can be expected through this dynamic new Tour model. 

Now, we just need an idea for a title sponsor… 🤔