Everything but the Major for Scottie Scheffler

Welcome to The Debrief, Box Score’s freewheeling conversation about the sports we love. This week, we’re talking about the Tour Championship, Scottie Scheffler’s major-less Player of the Year campaign, next steps for LIV golfers Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau, and the fallout from the Good Good-Callaway ad.

Michael Collins
Michael Collins is co-host of the YouTube golf and travel series Caddie & The Kid with Ken Griffey Jr. He is also a senior golf analyst and SportsCenter contributor for ESPN.

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, The 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.

Scottie Scheffler won the season-ending Tour Championship on Sunday and he's the overwhelming favorite to win Player of the Year. How should we view this season for Scheffler without a win in a major?

Michael Collins: How many people have been debating who the Player of the Year should be because Scottie didn't win a major? And when you look at the list of major winners this year, it goes Rory McIlroy, Aaron Rai, Wyndham Clark and Ryan Fox. They're definitely not players of the year. When you look at the PGA Tour, even for this year, there's only one guy that people say, "If his name starts moving on the leaderboard, here we go again." And that's Scottie Scheffler. And it's been that way for the past couple of years.

Cameron Morfit: I don't think there's any question that he's the Player of the Year. I think it's full credit to him. It's not necessarily his fault that the Tour Championship wasn't particularly compelling. He's doing what he needs to do. He's better than all these guys. I can't see anybody voting for Wyndham Clark. He had three wins and he had a major among those three wins, but Scottie Scheffler had 13 top-five finishes in 20 starts, which is pretty outrageous.

Farrell Evans: It's sad that he's going to win Player of the Year. Your best player, by a long shot, doesn't win a major when that's all that seems to matter when comparing any player to greats like Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus.

Michael Collins: Even if he won a major, would you be excited? Here's the thing, and this is the problem for the PGA Tour right now. Scottie Scheffler is the San Antonio Spurs with Tim "The Big Fundamental" Duncan. He's great, but there's no controversy about him. That's the thing that in today's society, we want something to be mad at. You're talking about a dude who's a great guy, a great husband, a great father, isn't controversial, and when he wins, he goes and gets a little vanilla ice cream cone with his wife, and they hold hands and walk down and go to church, and everybody's like, "Yeah, do you want to watch that?" No. Nobody wants to watch that. But does that mean it's not great? No.

Laz Versalles: I don't know that we need him to be controversial. It's just that he's incredibly unelectric as a player. When you look back on the players that excite us, there's something very electric about the way they play. And there's something very Tom Kite about the way Scottie Scheffler plays.

Starting in 2028, the PGA Tour will revamp the Tour Championship into a two-week, match-play event that rotates to new golf courses instead of staying permanently at East Lake Golf Club. What do you think of all the changes?

Laz Versalles: I don't necessarily view the Tour Championship as a championship. So, I'm happy they're trying something new. I hope they take advantage of all the great places we have in this country.

Michael Collins: I'm excited about it as a golf fan and pessimistic that the match format will stay. Because in the past match play tournaments, we got winners that no one wanted. Everyone is going to be excited about the concept because in everybody's mind at the end it's Rory versus Scotty. That never happens ever in match play.

Cameron Morfit: I think it is arguable that the golf course is in some sense the star or should be the star if you pick the right course. I'm looking right now on my screen. There's a place called Wolf Creek Golf Club in Mesquite, Nev. I don't know if you guys have ever played there, but it is the wackiest, craziest-looking course ever. It looks like golf on the freaking moon, and it would look great on TV. When all is said and done, it's a TV show, right? You're trying to create something that's compelling, something that people actually want to watch. I would watch golf at Wolf Creek Golf Club before I would watch it at East Lake. I don't know what the ratings are going to be for the Tour Championship, but everybody already knows that Scottie Scheffler is the best. Nobody's going to tune in thinking, "Gee, I wonder what East Lake looks like on TV." We know that. So, let's try something different, try to change it up.

Michael Collins: Here's my question. Other than the Masters, name me one golf course where people tuned in and didn't care about the golf or who was playing and they only turned it on so they could see what the landscape looked like.

Cameron Morfit: Pebble Beach and Hawaii every single year because people want to warm up through their TV set.

Farrell Evans: This is really sad. I respect all you guys, but you guys are just talking about gimmicks. The elephant in the room is that we got all these gimmicks because we're trying to come up with making golf exciting in the absence of Tiger Woods. Scheffler's not going to do it.

Laz Versalles: The whole thing is a gimmick. The whole thing is a money grab product. We need three more weeks of TV. We need to call it something. By the way, this was started 10 years after Tiger hit the scene. So, how do we get more milk out of that cow? Let's make another product that frankly is nap television. You're turning it on in the hopes that you take a nap and then you get your dinner prep going after your nap. This has nothing to do with Tiger or I don't think we're missing the fact that stars can kind of make golf more compelling. The point is that the entire thing is a gimmick. We would all be a lot better off if the Tour was like, "Hey, that's our 20 weeks. We're out of here. Enjoy college football and the NFL. We love you. Bye. See you in April."

Cameron Morfit: We all realize this is the powers that be who are throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing if anything sticks. The reason why golf is in the place that it's in is money and LIV. Because there's one main job that golf has right now and that is identifying the next Tiger or somebody that reminds viewers of Tiger as fast as possible. And while that's happening, some rivalries would be good. Guess what? LIV completely destroyed both of those things. We had a guy who was Tiger-like in his ability to make putts under pressure when it mattered most. His name was Cam Smith. He was No. 2 in the world. He went to LIV. He's now deep in the 100s.

Dark clouds are surrounding LIV Golf. The upstart golf league announced mass layoffs that begin this week. Two of golf's biggest stars — Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau — are still under contract with LIV. If you were advising those players, what would you tell them?

Farrell Evans: I would tell Rahm to get out and take the $5 million fine and do what Brooks Koepka has done and get back to playing on the PGA Tour or the DP World Tour. Bryson is in a different situation because he's a true believer in his ability to use social media to bring attention to almost everything but his performance on the golf course. But I think he's a great enough player to where if he ever gets his head right, he would say, "Hey, this thing didn't work out. Let me go back and play the PGA Tour."

Laz Versalles: I would honestly tell Bryson, let's stop b***** people all the time with everything. You're talented enough. You're great enough. So much of him is unnecessary b***** and his ability to build this massive audience of fans who are largely dependent on parental controls to tune in to the Bryson channel. I would ask him to just take a deep look in the mirror. And so you don't have to fool everyone into thinking you're this crazy physicist that has figured out ways to spray a golf ball with moisture before you hit it on the range to get numbers. You are talented and great enough at this game to just play it and be your authentic self. So, I think there are a lot of things that prevent Bryson from being his authentic self, and it keeps coming out in the weirdest of ways. This entire LIV mission was probably the most forward attempt to be something other than just him. I wonder what kind of career he would have if he didn't have to trick everyone into thinking standard single-length irons are the best for everybody.

Michael Collins: People can say whatever they want about LIV. It didn't work. But here's the thing. Is the PGA Tour better without Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau? I had a conversation with one of the best golfers in the world at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. He looked around and said, "You're telling me this place wouldn't be better if Bryson wasn't here going for the sixth green." All we talk about is how we got to grow this game. And now a dude is growing the game and people don't like the way he's doing it. They're like, "Hey, you shouldn't do that. You're bringing people to the game.” There's no right or wrong way to bring people to the game. So now you see Bryson DeChambeau and he's in a place right now where he's like, "Listen, I'm doing my social media. I'm bringing my social media team. You don't get to get a piece of this." The NCAA already lost that battle in court. You think the Tour wants to go to battle like that again? If Bryson doesn't come back to the PGA Tour, what do you think? You think he is not going to play golf? You think he's not going to do social media stuff? And guess who's going with him? All the 13- to 17-year-olds that the Tour is like, "Man, I wish we could get them to come with us."

Cameron Morfit: I think we're getting a little confused here. Some people are talking about social media engagement, some people are talking about actual competition. I assumed we were talking about actual golf. I was assuming that the reason why these guys were doing this in the first place is to go out and win majors and actually have a career. If Bryson doesn't care about that, if Bryson just wants to engage people on his YouTube channel, fine. I guess my advice to him would be just keep doing what you're doing and don't worry about anything, right? But if we believe that they want to actually have a career, win majors, be remembered as some of the best players ever, then what I would advise both of them to do is show a little bit of humility and contrition and start going on a goodwill tour and just basically trying to reestablish some good mojo with not only people who play on the PGA Tour, but also, more importantly, the fans.

Michael Collins: Put Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm and Bryson on a TGL team. This would be Bad Boys in golf. We were gone and you hate us and now we're back. It'll be awesome.

There has been a lot of fallout over the Good Good ad for Callaway Golf, which showed a male golfer shoving a female golfer to the ground when she tried to touch his driver. (Good Good apologized for the video and said that it was intended to be a parody of the movie Obsession.) Callaway cut ties with the YouTube influencer and golf apparel brand, the PGA Tour took away Good Good's title sponsorship of an upcoming Fall Series event, and the Golf Channel shelved a Big Break x Good Good series. Callaway also said the company was donating $1 million to charities working to prevent violence against women. What are some of the lessons that will come out of this?

Cameron Morfit: I think the big lesson is that for the big, established, endemic brands like Callaway, they should not immediately defer creatively to the hot new thing because you don't know what you're quite getting into. You don't know if this thing that's meant to be edgy is going to actually go over the line and offend everybody. I think what was happening at Callaway is that they thought, "Yeah, if you say it's cool, I guess it's cool." And no one was really paying attention to what was going on until the whole thing blew up in their face. So I think that's the lesson for them. If you're going to create an ad that's a parody of a movie, start with a movie somebody's actually seen. That would be a good idea. So I think the whole thing just shows how lost golf is really.

Laz Versalles: The problem with that ad is the way he, in a very hyper-predatory way, is inches from the camera talking in a horrible tone to a woman. So maybe that concept would have been good and funny if people did see Obsession, which I didn't. But the edit was terrible in that when I saw it, I had no idea he was saving her. I thought he was threatening to hurt her for touching his diver. So it did look very violent to me. Whatever parody was supposed to come across was completely lost.

Farrell Evans: I think it's a case of very selective political correctness. We live in a culture now where we have a president in office who can be in a space where he allows someone in his presence to call Michelle Obama a man. It is a joke. This is the same guy that uses his social media to depict Michelle and Barack as apes. And it's sort of laughed off. It's a joke. We have a pervasive bro culture that people decide when it's cool for the bro culture to say stuff and it's like all in fun. We all grew up watching Sanford and Son, and Esther and Fred Sanford had fun bantering with each other. We had a lot of fun with that. It was all fun. Was the Good Good ad done in poor taste? Yes. But people shouldn't have lost jobs over a parody that failed on arrival, particularly when we live in a culture that permits all kinds of crude stuff that is intentionally meant to hurt people.

Michael Collins: I will say when I watched the commercial I went, "That's dumb." It wasn't funny. It wasn't entertaining. I have never seen that movie. So my thing is if you're going to do something like that, you better make reference to the movie at the very beginning of what you were trying to accomplish.

I don't remember there being outrage when Betty White got slammed in a Snickers commercial, right? Does anybody remember the Terry Tate: Office Linebacker commercial for Reebok when he went around the office slamming dudes, women, all of that? There wasn't that outrage for that either. Now on the flip side of that, all of those commercials were also done at a time when there wasn't outrage and cancel culture. And everybody at the time watched those commercials and were like, "That's not promoting violence toward anyone. It's just a funny, cute commercial." Cute, right? Could they make that commercial today? Probably not. Why? Because everybody in the room would be like, "In today's culture, we better not put that out there."

Cameron Morfit: You're right, but I think that's also why this has happened because I think there was a pent-up frustration that there have to be some consequences. I think that there's a very Malcolm Gladwellian tipping point going on here. Finally, there are some consequences and now everybody's piling on because it's like, "Hey, there weren't consequences for situation XYZ," going all the way back to Farrell's comment on things that the president tweeted. Now there are finally consequences. So I think this is actually a pent-up thing. I think the commercial was wrong, but does the amount of outrage necessarily fit a really dumb 15-second commercial? ⛳

If you enjoyed this edition of Box Score, please pass it along to a friend and encourage them to sign up at boxscoresports.com. We’ll see you again on Wednesday.