Relegation is trendy, but PGA TOUR's always had it

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Chris Condon/PGA TOUR

Bud Cauley is one of the few players to get a PGA TOUR card without q-school or a stint on the Nationwide Tour.

The concept sounds pretty simple.

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To the victor go the spoils. On the flip side, there's the agony of defeat.

Winners win, and losers deal.

We bring this up because two of the buzzwords in sports these days are promotion and relegation.

The terms have become popular because one of sports' legendary franchises -- Arsenal of the English Premier League -- has spent most of the autumn fighting off the embarrassment of possibly being relegated out of the EPL's first tier.

Kind of like the New York Yankees getting shipped to Triple-A Columbus.

Promotion and relegation each have their benefits in sports. Teams at the bottom of the standings are motivated to do whatever possible to avoid The Drop. Instead of becoming the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA or the Kansas City Royals of Major League Baseball -- cellar dwellers for years -- teams are encouraged to find a way to win or they are dropped to the minor leagues.

Conversely, teams that have struggled for years can get promoted with a stellar season. They always have a light at the end of a dark tunnel.

Would this system work in the United States? Not for team sports. There's no comparable level of minor leagues to the NFL or the NBA. But as far as individual sports, promotion and relegation have been as much a part of the PGA TOUR for decades as birdies and bogeys.

You play well, you stay. You struggle, you go to the Nationwide Tour or to the mini-tours.

There are no guaranteed contracts in golf. No inactive list. No September call-up. No 10-day contracts. You can't ask someone else on your team to pick up the slack while you work through your slump.

Even in the PGA TOUR's non-exempt days, players grinded away on Friday, knowing if they made the cut, it would get them into the next week's tournament. That's flex scheduling at its worst.

Nowadays, with a good week turning a rookie into a millionaire, the rules of entry are still as black and white as the old Masters' reruns of the 1950s. That's why the PGA TOUR lists 33 categories of exempt priority rankings for the 2011 season, starting with "winners of PGA Championship or U.S. Open prior to 1970 or in the last 10 calendar years" and ending with "veteran members with a minimum of 150 made cuts as needed to fill the field." In between are all the ways the players receive their tee times on the PGA TOUR.

There may be other avenues for popular vets such as John Daly and Peter Jacobsen, who landed more than their share of sponsor exemptions. But at the end, they had to finish in the top 125 on the final money list, at the least, to have a guaranteed job the next season.

True, Tiger Woods finished 128th this year, but he keeps his job at least through 2014 because he won the 2008 U.S. Open, led the 2009 money list and also won six times in 2009. But Paul Casey, who has been a fixture in the top 10 in the Official World Golf Ranking the last few years, has currently lost his full-exempt status after finishing 136th. Casey was among 74 players who had 15 or more starts this year and finished outside the top 125.

Meantime, J.J. Killeen led 25 players on the Nationwide Tour who officially were promoted Sunday to become 2012 PGA TOUR members, based on their money finish. Doesn't matter who they know -- it's their job.

There is not just one path to the PGA TOUR, as Bud Cauley showed. The 21-year-old from Jacksonville turned pro this summer and earned enough in his eight TOUR starts to bypass q-school because he would have finished 116th on this year's money list. Only five others -- Phil Mickelson, Woods, Gary Hallberg, Ryan Moore and Justin Leonard -- can make this claim.

Another well-traveled path to the PGA TOUR remains q-school, but it's as meritocratic as the others. Only the lowest scores advance. Sam Saunders' granddad (Arnold Palmer) might have gotten him seven sponsor exemptions this year, but Sam was the one who took medalist honors in a first-stage q-school event last week in St. Augustine.

So Saunders advances, while many others wait for another year to have a shot at the PGA TOUR.

As it should be.Craig Dolch is a freelance columnist for PGATOUR.COM. His views do not necessarily represent the views of the PGA TOUR.