Welcome to The Debrief, Box Score’s freewheeling conversation about the sports we love that begins right when the action stops.

Cameron Morfit
Cameron Morfit covered the PGA Tour for most of Tiger's career. His work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Golf Magazine, Golf Digest and other publications. He spent eight years at the PGA Tour itself, providing mostly written content to PGATour.com.

Laz Versalles
Laz Versalles is a freelance golf writer who lives in Los Angeles. You can find his work on Skratch, Wall Street Journal and other corners of the internet.

Farrell Evans
Farrell Evans is a Box Score co-founder, former Sports Illustrated golf writer and the executive producer of The Land We Share, a documentary about the intimate bonds between the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and the Shinnecock Indian Nation.

Rory McIlroy is in the field this week in Memphis for the first leg of the FedEx Cup Playoffs after skipping the event last year. During the Open Championship, he admitted that the playoffs didn't get his “juices flowing.” He hasn't been in favor of the PGA Tour's direction of late and pointed to the fact that he's already assured of making it to the winner-take-all final at East Lake. What accounts for McIlroy’s "bad attitude" toward the PGA Tour and the playoffs?

Laz Versalles: To put the championship of professional golf in Memphis in August only serves one group and that's the sponsor, FedEx. As a player who's chasing history and has done enough to get to the last stage in Atlanta, Rory is not wrong. He's got enough points. He's qualified. So if you want to drag your family to Memphis for a week in the middle of the summer, go for it. I think it's one of the armpits of America and I wouldn't want to be there even in the middle of October. I do not think he has a bad attitude. He'll play in the final, so they are lucky that he's even showing up.

Farrell Evans: Rory is one of the biggest faces in the game right now with Scottie Scheffler. He won his second-straight Masters this year. We've got this new two-tiered PGA Tour that's starting in 2028, and Rory is not a fan of some aspects of that. It helps the PGA Tour if Rory, their most marketable player, is in lockstep with what the Tour is doing, and he's not. I would love to see the Tour and Rory be in alignment, but I don't think it's a bad attitude. I think he is like any employee who doesn't like some of what's going on with management. He's been vocal about it, but he's being a good sport this week by playing.

Cameron Morfit: I covered the FedEx Cup playoff event at TPC Southwind two years ago when Rory was there, but should have just gone home. He was a dead man walking. I've never seen a player look like that before. He did not care at all. I'm actually pretty surprised that he's going to be back this coming week. I don't really know what's in it for him. Somebody must have sweet-talked him into doing it.

Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, former CEO of the PGA of America, recently suggested that the PGA Tour should strike a deal to buy the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup. (The two events are owned by the PGA of America.) Do you agree?

Cameron Morfit: If you're the PGA Tour, you've got to look at what moves the needle and what cuts through the clutter of the sports landscape. The Ryder Cup is obviously up there with the four majors. They're never going to find a way to get in on the US Open or the Masters, but if they can find a way to get in on the Ryder Cup, by all means they should do it.

Farrell Evans: Bevacqua made a good analogy: What if the NFL did not control the Super Bowl? And right now, the PGA Tour doesn't own any of these four big pillars. But at the same time I don't love consolidation. Structurally, I like golf having the PGA Tour, the R&A, the Masters, the USGA. When we start talking about consolidation and the Tour having that much control, I'm not a fan of it.

Laz Versalles: As an organization, the PGA of America gets almost 80% of their revenue from the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup. That organization should not be running major championship golf like that. As someone who was in the PGA of America, it's a group where their core membership right now is asking, "Why am I paying dues and what's it for?" The touch points are going away for club pros. You used to answer the phone to make a tee time, you used to fold the shirts that people would buy, and you used to give people lessons. Now, people take lessons online, they buy their shirts on Amazon, and they're making their tee times online. The PGA of America members who pay into that are not seeing that organization do anything to bolster their membership. So now you say, "Hey, you guys should buy our flagship products." All right. It's worth noting that the viewership was brutal for the Ryder Cup last year. It also competes with football. I'd be a little leery of buying the Ryder Cup. And, frankly, the Players is a better championship than the PGA Championship. So I wouldn't be chomping at the bit to buy the PGA Championship either.

 LIV Golf announced this week that the upstart golf league has found a lead investor to fund its 2027 season after Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund pulled out. Could LIV still be a good investment or are we just seeing the sharks starting to circle?

Farrell Evans: I'm not an investment banker, but I know a little bit about diligence. LIV hasn't done great with TV. People have not bought into the whole team golf thing. It is next to impossible to displace legacy businesses. As an investor, if you told me, "Hey, I'm going to do a better PGA Tour. I'm going to have the same format. I'm going to have the whole charitable part of it. But I'm going to do it better." That's worth listening to. But instead, LIV went to investors and said, "I'm going to do something totally different that the market isn't asking for." If you want to open a steakhouse, you try to make a better steakhouse. But you don't say, "I'm going to make a steakhouse, but we're going to have Impossible Steaks." That's not a steakhouse. 

Cameron Morfit: One thing that was successful with LIV is that it did find some untapped markets. When LIV went to Australia, for example, there was this real fever to watch live golf and to watch these superstars because they hadn't been there enough. The infrastructure does exist for some of these tournaments where there has been success. They have drawn some fans, but I think they would have to exist within a framework of an organization that actually is successful. LIV was trying to be separate from everybody and be its own thing. I don't think that worked. But if they can somehow figure out a way to ally themselves with the PGA Tour or the European Tour and be the LIV portion of the schedule then maybe it works. 

Laz Versalles: I don't see a way forward for LIV and I don't think they have an investor. Because an investor would be giving them a large amount of money to execute this plan because if the plan works then we all make money. What they have is a loan — potentially. And a press release to go along with it. I watched LIV. I enjoyed the TV product. I did not have an issue getting over the moral dilemma of Saudi Arabian money because I also use Uber and watch Disney films and go to a lot of places where Saudi money is involved and it's fine. There is a hole in the Southern Hemisphere for sports and that's a golf-hungry part of the globe. But to invest in something, you need to get something back. What would you get from LIV? What do they have? A bloated contract that Jon Rahm doesn't want to fulfill? Bryson DeChambeau, who's also going to hold you hostage, who's not sure if he wants to be a YouTuber or a golfer? A product that in its first iteration left a horrible taste in everyone's mouth? So maybe there's some deal that can be made with another tour, but there's no reason to invest in LIV. Looking back, LIV took a PGA Tour that was in a horribly complacent rut for 20 years — thank God for Tiger — and made the Tour actually look in the mirror and get more competitive and stronger and be a more appealing product. LIV made the Tour a lot better, and then they shot themselves in the foot with the wrong cast of characters.

Cameron Morfit: Golf was always going to have the mother of all hangovers after Tiger became irrelevant. What happened with LIV is it introduced a jackhammer to the hangover and it blew everything apart. Basically, it exposed horrendous greed. It proved really definitively that the four majors are the only things that matter. And I think it's going to be a while before golf puts itself back together again.

Who is your pick to win the FedEx Cup playoffs and why? 

Laz Versalles: Scottie Scheffler. I think he's an exceptional talent and his talent is an unwillingness to ever stop absolutely grinding out everything. He's just relentless like that. He's going to win Player of the Year. He would get my vote, and the FedEx Cup is a way for him to put an exclamation point on what was a really strong season. 

Farrell Evans: I like Matt Fitzpatrick. The three wins, two individual wins and then the win with his brother in New Orleans. Matt has taken a couple weeks off. He's fresh. He missed one cut this whole season. He had a bad week at the Open Championship. But outside of Scottie Scheffler and maybe Cameron Young, I think Matt Fitzpatrick has played the most consistent golf all season. 

Cameron Morfit: So if you want to pick an outsider in Matt Fitzpatrick, I'll go even outsider-ier and pick Xander Schauffele, who's at No. 11 in the standings. Schauffele actually has won the Tour Championship before. So he likes East Lake. He has a pretty great record there. And I don't think being 11th really makes that much of a difference going into it. You can make up a lot of ground pretty quickly. It's really more about who's playing well at the end. I wouldn't bet against Rory either. I don't know what it is about East Lake, but he likes playing there. There was that one year where Rory reeled in Scheffler when Scheffler started with a six-shot lead. Scheffler cried that year. So if Rory can be compelled enough to care, he wouldn't be a bad pick. 

How would you improve the playoffs if you were running the PGA Tour?

Cameron Morfit: Make it match play. Head-to-head golf is interesting. People understand it. Survive and advance. And you might get some fun matchups. You might get Jackson Koivun versus Scheffler, for example, which everybody wants to see. The young superstar who just won a PGA Tour event. Let's see what you do going head-to-head with Scottie Scheffler. Let's see if the kid blinks. That's fun. You're never going to eclipse the four majors. You're never going to eclipse the Ryder Cup. You're never going to even eclipse the Players, but at least make it fun.

Laz Versalles: Let's do it at the beginning of the year, like how the Daytona 500 is the biggest race in NASCAR. Someone is winning $20 million to start the year. This sounds a lot like the Tournament of Champions in Maui, where the previous year’s winners got into that tournament. But the FedEx Cup playoffs are not working in any form right now for a reason, and that's because it's a product that nobody really asked for that was created to keep the sponsors happy. So let's just blow the whole thing up, and do it first.

Farrell Evans: I wouldn't have a playoff at all. I like what they do in F1, where it's a season-long accumulation of points and then you've got these great moments near the end of the season where you have Lewis Hamilton and Lando Norris and all these drivers trying to accumulate points to win. That way, all the tournaments are big. The last time I checked, F1 is not hurting at all by not having a playoff system. 🏎

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