2014 Ryder Cup standings: Tiger Woods will need captain’s pick to make USA roster

The Ryder Cup has become as exciting a golf event, if not more than all of the four major championships and if it’s early enough for 2015 NFL mock drafts and preseason polls, then it’s early enough to start looking at the standings and potential rosters for Scotland in September.

There is, of course, so much time for shuffling in the standings and there will be lots of movement up and down and back again between now and the finalization of each roster. For Tom Watson’s USA team, points qualifying will close right after the PGA Championship in early August and then three captain’s picks will be made in September. On the European side, points qualifying will close at the end of the Race to Dubai, scheduled to finish on August 31st. European Captain Paul McGinley will then also make three captain’s picks shortly thereafter.

Here’a a look at how each team is constructed, where we are today, and why this summer’s roster races will be so much fun to track.

The qualifying process for the American side is pretty straightforward. Every major championship in between Ryder Cups count, with this year’s weighted. You get a point for every $1,000 earned in a 2013 major, and two points for every $1,000 earned in this year’s four majors. You also get a point for every $1,000 earned at a PGA Tour event on the 2013-14 wraparound schedule from the start in October at the Frys.com Open to the aforementioned conclusion of the PGA Championship (so a run in the FedExCup won’t count). There’s a third way to earn points, and that’s at the lesser but still officially sanctioned tournaments opposite the majors and the exclusive limited-field WGC events. Players can get a half-point per $1k at these events if they’re left out of playing with the big boys.

With three more majors, and millions still up for grabs over the next two and a half months, here are the top 25 in the American points standings.

It’s pretty safe to say the top four in the current standings are all locks, and after that, you can probably pencil in Phil Mickelson even though he’s having a shaky year. I tried to extend the list to a manageable top 25, acknowledging that there’s still a lot of room for movement. With just one win last week, Brendon Todd jumped from 51 to 19. But even extending it to a top 25, we’re still missing some huge names and recent team USA members like Hunter Mahan, Brandt Snedeker, and ... um, Tiger Woods.

Barring a miracle, Tiger will need to be a captain’s pick. If his timetable of a “summer” return holds up, he should be ready and able to play in the event by the end of September. But he may only play once or twice, or perhaps not at all, before qualifying closes at the end of the PGA on August 10. He’s going to miss the U.S. Open, and the British Open sounds doubtful. That leaves Firestone the first weekend in August and the PGA the next week.

There’s an ascendant group of would-be rookies who will qualify or be hard to leave off, including Spieth, Patrick Reed, Harris English, and Gary Woodland. Reed’s the most likely candidate to tumble out of the top 9, given his recent form since that WGC title at Doral. But all four would be welcome additions as the roster continues to turn over to the younger guys. If qualifying closed with this top 9, I’d think Watson would go with Jason Dufner, Keegan Bradley, and Tiger as his captain’s picks. Snedeker has been incredible over the past two seasons but done nothing this year, and while Watson seems to have an affinity for Mahan and specifically cited his omission in 2012 as a reason for dialing down the amount of captain’s choices, there would just be no room.

Dufner has been too good in these team competitions the last two years, and is an automatic pairing with Zach Johnson. Bradley needs to pick it up and get a win again, but he was too valuable in the 2012 Ryder Cup and 2013 Presidents Cup to fall behind some of the younger guys gunning for a spot. He’s become an important part of Team USA and should be there going forward for many years.

And Tiger has to be on the team if he’s healthy. If he’s really unsure, he could take it out of Watson’s hands and say he’ll take his name out of it. But that seems unlikely if he’s healthy and if he doesn’t, you have to put him on the team. It’s an international event that’s perfect for TV, and the most important, dominating, intimidating, and biggest superstar in the history of the sport cannot be left out.

The points qualifying process for the European side is a little more complicated because such a significant portion of their potential roster does not play full-time on the same tour. Some of the biggest European stars in golf have relocated to the U.S. and spend most of their time playing on the PGA Tour as opposed to the Euro Tour. So there are two separate points standings, one dedicated to money earned on the Euro Tour and another that goes off World Ranking points for players originally from Europe. The first way to qualify is to finish in the top four of the “European Points List,” which assigns a point for every Euro earned on that tour from the end of last year’s Race to Dubai through this year’s Race (ending Aug 31). The current top 15 on that European Points list are:

In addition to the European points race, there’s also a separate “World Points List” that auto-qualifies the top five not otherwise qualified above. This is calculated purely on a player’s Official World Golf Rankings points from the same timeframe above (end of August 2013 thru end of August 2014). Here’s where many of the players who play less on the Euro Tour and have less opportunities to accumulate those points in the first set of standings get on the team. The current top 15 in the World Points list:

...and boom, man is Europe is going to be loaded. We already knew this, but looking at the standings and those not among the current nine qualifiers just reinforces how hard this is going to be for McGinley. A world-class deserving player, or two or three, is going to be left off the team. Graeme McDowell, who is currently 15th in the world, is not on either of these lists. The same goes for Swede Jonas Blixt, who won on the PGA Tour last year and just finished second at the Masters.

Wherever he lands on the standings at the end of August, we can assume Ian Poulter will be on that final team of 12. Poulter’s 12-3 record in four separate Ryder Cups nets the best winning percentage of any player in the event’s history (minimum 15 matches). He’s never lost a singles match at the wire on Sunday, and he’s the face and soul of the European team, its comebacks, its victories. Aside from the success in the team events, he’s also been amazing at annual WGC match play tournament. That success, but mostly his continued nagging dominance over the Americans in the Ryder Cup, has earned him the title as the best match play golfer in the world. Unless he’s injured, he’ll be on the team.

Poulter would make it 10, leaving two spots for the resurgent Miguel Angel Jimenez, veteran Lee Westwood, Francesco Molinari, McDowell, and Blixt ... oh, and also the above-listed Joost Luiten and Stephen Gallacher, who continue to pile up cash and are both inside the top 50 in the world. Jimenez, who just won the Spanish Open at 50-years-old, may play his way on through qualifying. Given his year, it will be hard to keep him off and he’s another one of those players, like Poulter, who’s become part of European golf’s soul. He’s eligible for the senior tour, and was an assistant captain the last time around in 2012, but he’s been too good so far and it’s likely he makes his fifth appearance. That leaves a spot probably for one of two old standbys, Lee Westwood, who’s played in every Ryder Cup since 1997, or McDowell, who clinched it in 2010 and is a reputed killer in match play.

The mix of new guys -- Dubuisson, Donaldson -- and old guys who’ve found their form -- Bjorn, Jimenez -- will make this so tough to trim to 12. There will be shifting between now and the end of August, starting this week at the BMW PGA Championship, the Euro Tour’s flagship event that draws all these top names and has a sizable purse. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone like Gallacher, who has been clearly targeting a spot, jumps up and pushes another one of the regulars out of the picture. For now, however, given this current makeup, I think McGinley’s captain’s picks would go Poulter, Jimenez, and Westwood. This is probably going to be harder than rounding out the American side.

★★★

With those qualifying rules and caveats, here’s where I think we’re at:

We’ll continue to track this throughout the summer, and update who’s rising, falling, and check in with roster predictions for each side. There will be shuffling on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis, but for me, the Ryder Cup has become the second-best event in golf, only behind the Masters. There’s been incredible talent that’s bubbled up on both sides in recent years (20 of the top 26 players in the world and no one outside the top 35 played at Medinah) to make it extremely competitive. There are no more outliers way down the world rankings or quirky captain’s picks. And that makes it worthwhile to track the roster races over the next two-plus months.