Tour Guide: John Deere Diving

Welcome to this week’s edition of Tour Guide! Below you’ll find some analysis on former John Deere champ Jordan Spieth’s precarious points situation, and what that might mean for how the PGA Tour operates going forward. Plus a look back at a great shot from the Rocket Mortgage Classic as well as a trip down memory lane to a John Deere moment that ended up mattering a great deal at the Ryder Cup.

Mr. 59

By Joseph LaMagna

Of all the active pro golf career arcs, perhaps none is more compelling than Jordan Spieth’s. Jordan Spieth is a three-time major winner and the former No. 1 player in the world, and throughout the past few years he’s shown occasional flashes of his 2015-2017 self. But he has not consistently performed like the Jordan Spieth of nearly a decade ago. This week, Spieth is featured in the John Deere Classic field, making him by far the most recognizable name slated to tee it up at TPC Deere Run. However, no matter how his appearance is promoted, whether marketed as support for a small-market non-signature event or an expression of loyalty to a tournament at which he experienced success early in his career, the reality is that Spieth is playing the Deere for the first time since 2015 because he needs to be there.

Crucially, Spieth currently sits 59th in the FedEx Cup standings. If he fails to finish inside the top 50 of the standings this season, he will not be exempt into signature events next year via FedEx Cup placing, nor will he likely have the necessary OWGR position (must be 30th or better) to earn entry. Thus, assuming the PGA Tour does not change its signature event qualification criteria, Jordan Spieth would rely on two heavily scrutinized mechanisms of the Tour’s current structure: sponsor’s exemptions and/or playing his way in via performance in non-signature events.

One of the tour’s most marketable and accomplished golfers, Jordan Spieth is a prime use case for how the PGA Tour is transforming its product into a more competitive, cutthroat tour, theoretically shifting away from a system full of exemptions, favoritism, and coasting off the accomplishments of years past. Should Spieth fail to qualify for signature events next year, the PGA Tour can either consider his absence a detriment to its product or it can be considered an opportunity to prove the merits of the model the Tour has put into place, which provides a pathway for players to earn their way into signature events via strong play in non-signature events. Of course, a likely outcome is the continued reliance upon sponsor exemptions, which every sponsor of a signature event on tour would surely be quick to grant Spieth. But with each sponsor exemption gifted to Jordan in order to boost fan interest in a tournament, the Tour’s competitive integrity is simultaneously compromised, an instructive example of incentive misalignment baked into the current PGA Tour structure.

If the Tour keeps moving towards a truly meritocratic system in which poor stretches of play result in quasi-relegation, the stakes for Spieth during a week like this week’s John Deere are raised. Thus, the John Deere Classic takes on elevated importance. At the same time, golf is a volatile sport. Nearly every player in the world, with the rare exceptions of consistent year-over-year achievers like Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson, goes through poor stretches of play, even during their prime years. If the Tour’s structure leaves struggling, high-profile names on the outside looking in following natural blips in their performance, external competitors (i.e. LIV Golf) offer players a lucrative alternative to playing their way back into the PGA Tour’s most prestigious events through a more meritocratic system. This obviously threatens the PGA Tour’s business model. You can make a good faith argument that providing safety nets to the game’s most accomplished and popular players is necessary from a business standpoint, though I do disagree with that philosophy when it comes at the expense of competition.

These are legitimately complex considerations for the PGA Tour to work through. In my opinion, the key takeaway for the tour is that these types of situations further emphasize the need to establish a clean, sensible promotion system, which it does not have right now. The current system is convoluted and can be gamed. With a cleaner, better system, Spieth could more easily earn his way back into signature events when he fails to qualify for them at the end of a season, without reliance on sponsor exemptions or roundabout measures intended to keep the mouths of the highest-profile players in the sport fed.

In any case, Spieth is a terrific litmus test for the problem set that’s being worked out in real time in professional golf. And his performance at the John Deere Classic, site of his debut Tour win, could ultimately influence the PGA Tour’s decision-making as it tweaks its model over the next couple of years.

One Shot From Last Week

By Will Knights

One of my favorite shots to watch is the low runner that chases to a back pin. That shot is usually an option in firm conditions but it’s made more difficult when greens are soft, as they were at Detroit Golf Club. Yet Aaron Rai managed to pull off this beauty to begin the final round of the Rocket Mortgage Classic.

A birdie at the first for Aaron Rai 💪

The Englishman takes the solo lead in pursuit of his first PGA TOUR title @RocketClassic. pic.twitter.com/0JCwWmYrK5

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) June 30, 2024

The reason I’m so impressed with shots like this is because it would be significantly easier to just take a full rip and hope you get your distance correct. But into the wind, as Rai’s shot was, that opens up the risk of ballooning the shot into the air or spinning the ball back too far. Rai puts the ball back in his stance to take some spin off the shot, and does a great job of judging the rollout in the soft conditions.

I, for one, would not be opposed to professionals needing to flight the ball more often.

Memory Lane: From Deere Run to Hazeltine

By Jay Rigdon

The John Deere Classic has produced a surprising number of indelible golf Twitter-era moments. Future major winners Jordan Spieth and Bryson DeChambeau broke through with their first PGA Tour wins at TPC Deere Run, in 2013 and 2017, respectively. And who could forget Zach Johnson being startled by an air cannon fired off a boat on the Rock River?

His hand-over-heart reaction as he paces around the green is perhaps the most Midwestern bit of dramatics imaginable. It’s perfect.

But, because it’s a holiday week and they let me write this, we’re going back to 2016. At that point in the year, Ryan Moore was very much not in contention for the Ryder Cup team. 2016 was an odd calendar, jammed together differently to make room for the Rio Olympics, where golf was making its return to competition. Moore had made the cut at the U.S. Open, Open, and PGA, but hadn’t registered a top-30 finish since the WGC Match Play in February. A T-17 at the post-PGA Travelers, though, set him up for the John Deere, where he’d win thanks to a classy ball-striking display.

Was the field great? No, it was opposite the Olympics. Was it a fun, weird event? Absolutely. On Saturday, the final group putted out via light from a video leaderboard on the 18th, and only finished the round thanks to Steve Marino heroically sprinting to tee off on the final hole. (He had just made two birdies, hit a horrible drive after rushing to beat the horn, and bogeyed 18 in the dark.) But from there, Moore added two more T-8 or better finishes at the first two FedEx Cup events, before dueling Rory McIlroy across multiple playoff holes at the Tour Championship. That was enough to surprisingly earn the final slot on the Ryder Cup team, where he went 2-1 and clinched the Cup for the Americans.

As one of golf’s devoted Ryan Moore fans (we’re few but passionate), I can’t tell you how unlikely the rest of that story would have felt to me as I sat in my Denver apartment and watched him put away the John Deere. But there’s a direct line through time (and a few hundred miles up the Mississippi) from Moore’s win in the Quad Cities to a bit of golf history at Hazeltine.