There’s a Clear Path Forward for the U.S. Ryder Cup Team. Will They Take It?

The Sunday rally was good fun for a few hours, but a U.S. loss was the better outcome for the long-term health of the Ryder Cup. Nothing can change until Team USA admits how dire the situation has become.

FARMINGDALE, N.Y.—Another U.S. Ryder Cup defeat, another downbeat loser’s press conference. “Well, our team has to play better,” said the American captain. “That's the obvious answer, and they do. I think they recognise that fact; that somehow, collectively, 12 players have to play better.”

But this wasn’t Keegan Bradley at Bethpage, it was Tom Watson in Scotland, eleven years ago. It was a simplistic answer then and remains so now. Don’t let the singles rally of Team USA’s rugged individualists fool you: the Ryder Cup is a team game, and the American defeat was assured after losing all four of the partner sessions across the first two days and digging themselves a historic deficit. After going down 15-13 at this Ryder Cup, the U.S. became the first home team to lose since…the U.S. in 2012. (Before that, the last team to lose at home was…the U.S. in ‘04.) Europe has now won 9 of the 12 Cups played this century.

Where do the Americans go from here? They are biennially confronted with a culture of losing, leadership vacuums and structural inequities—despite Watson’s hectoring, they can’t just magically play better to make all of that disappear. Wholesale changes must be made if the U.S. team is ever going to be a consistent threat to win the Ryder Cup. In the wake of Watson’s defeat—and Phil Mickelson savaging him in front of the world—the PGA of America convened a much ballyhooed Ryder Cup Task Force to address systemic problems on the American side. It appeared to work for a little while, but Team USA is once again staring into the abyss.

The Europeans were brilliant at Bethpage, especially across the first two days, but the decades of U.S. futility is a lot more complicated than birdies and bogies. The captaincies of Watson and Bradley are bookended disasters that illustrate the fundamental unseriousness of Team USA. The European Tour has had for decades a dedicated Ryder Cup apparatus that is presided over by OGs like Thomas Bjorn and Paul McGinley. They groom vice captains, who serve for a couple of Cups until they are elevated to a full-blown captaincy. The institutional knowledge compounds year after year and is passed down to each new administration. There is cohesion at every level. The PGA of America runs a ragtag operation that has to be reinvented every two years when a new club pro becomes president. Watson’s captaincy in 2014 was a wild hair by a maverick PGA president, Ted Bishop. The Hall of Famer was 65, had zero connection with his players and brought a gruff, old-school communication style that rankled the troops. “Nobody here was in any decision,” Mickelson said in the tensest Ryder Cup press conference ever; he was still bitter after he and Bradley (!) were benched by Watson for all of day two despite being the U.S.’s most spirited duo. The Task Force tried to mimic the European way but was hastily disbanded after the U.S. won in 2016. Nothing had really been fixed, that team just happened to be stacked with young, generational talent: Brooks Koepka, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Patrick Reed, Rickie Fowler. With Europe’s core players heading into their dotage, the U.S. was positioned for long-term dominance. But it turns out institutions are more powerful than individuals.

For Paris in 2018, Europe took homefield advantage to the extreme with an outrageously penal setup that neutralized the American bombers. They became the first Ryder Cup team to go all-in on advanced analytics, employing computer nerd Edoardo Molinari as a vice captain. While Europe gamed the system, Jim Furyk’s captain’s picks were ill-suited for the course setup and his pairings, based on instinct and gut feelings and other factors that Molinari would scoff at, backfired spectacularly. Europe rallied around its fiery, inspirational leaders Ian Poulter and Sergio Garcia. Reed, the erstwhile Captain America, wanted to play that role for the U.S. but Spieth begged not to be paired with him; hard to be a team leader when your teammates hate you. As always, Woods was too introverted and awkward to rally the Yanks, and he didn’t try to hide his disdain for Mickelson, a fellow Hall of Famer; their bad juju poisoned two decades of U.S. team rooms. Paris should have been when the stacked Americans broke through on the road but a fractured, poorly-prepared and ill-considered team squandered the opportunity.

The U.S. won a weird, COVID-era Ryder Cup in 2021, when European fans were not allowed to travel to Wisconsin. But LIV Golf’s arrival in 2022 had a knockdown effect on the two ensuing European victories. When Henrik Stenson bolted for LIV, he was stripped of the captaincy and replaced by Luke Donald, who has been a transformative leader. McIlroy was a press conference troll squarely in the middle of the tour wars, but he stated flatly that LIV’s Jon Rahm had to be on the ‘23 team. The European Tour leaders swallowed their pride and, in the name of winning the Cup, made it happen. U.S captain Zach Johnson had no choice but to take LIV’s Brooks Koepka after he won the ‘23 PGA Championship, but Capt. Johnson gave zero consideration to other LIV players. “I don’t know the golf courses they’re playing,” he said. “Never seen them. It’s not fair for me to guess anybody’s true form that I can’t witness.” That was nonsensical; three venues on which LIV conducted tournaments in 2023 ahead of the Ryder Cup—the Greenbrier in West Virginia, El Camaleón Mayakoba in Mexico, and the Gallery Golf Club in Tucson—had previously hosted PGA Tour events. Various Americans have competed in the Singapore Open at Sentosa Golf Club, which hosted the LIV event; in fact, Johnson could have walked down the block on Sea Island to ask his neighbor Matt Kuchar about Sentosa, as Kuch won there in 2020. And nothing was stopping Johnson from doing his due diligence by streaming LIV tournaments. But, being a good company man, he was more than happy to snub Bryson DeChambeau, who finished 4th at the ‘23 PGA Championship and went 61-58 over the closing two rounds to win LIV Greenbrier, and Dustin Johnson, who was 5-0 at the previous Ryder Cup and, in the run-up to Rome, 10th at the U.S. Open and a winner at LIV Tulsa. (Cap. Zach instead burned his captain’s picks on the Jupiter boys club, snubbing the very deserving Keegan Bradley and setting in motion various events that would play out disastrously in Bethpage.) The animosity between the establishment and LIV players hurt the U.S. team but helped Donald. He might have felt compelled to give a last hurrah to geriatric European stalwarts Garcia, Poulter, Stenson and Lee Westwood, but their defections to LIV cleared the way for young studs Ludwig Aberg and Nicolai Hjøgaard and an ascendant Sepp Straka.

The Europeans were so dominant in Rome that the Ryder Cup was basically over by lunchtime on Saturday. With its commitment to continuity, Team Europe made the sensible decision to bring back Donald as captain. (In an effort to give every fading star a turn, no U.S. captain has been asked to run it back since Ben Hogan in 1949.) Donald brought 11 of the same players to Bethpage. Since the European Tour and the European Ryder Cup are the same thing, team members were paired together at tournaments throughout 2024, further fostering camaraderie.

Meanwhile, Team USA was groping in the dark, as always. Mickelson certainly would have been the captain at Bethpage before he became a pariah with the old guard. Woods turned down the job, saying he was too busy; doing what, nobody knows. Choosing the 39 year-old Bradley was such a Hail Mary by the PGA of America that Bradley didn’t know he was in the running until the stunning phone call telling him that he got the job. This cost Team USA the services of one of the best American players, as Bradley ultimately accepted McIlroy’s counsel (or bait?) that it would be impossible to be a playing-captain. He installed as vice captains four Tour contemporaries who had never served in a leadership role at the Ryder Cup (plus Furyk, who carries the stench of three decades of Ryder Cup failure as a player, captain and vice captain). Their collective cluelessness showed in the cupcake course setup at what is supposed to be big, bad Bethpage. It was an artistic failure and competitive disadvantage: for decades, Americans have shrugged off losses by lamenting that the Euros just made more putts, as if the vanquished players were incapable of doing the same thing; Bethpage’s setup reduced any ballstriking advantage the U.S. might have had and turned this Ryder Cup into a putting contest…against the guys who always out-putt them!

Then there were the face-palm pairings. It will always be an iconic stat that Bradley sent out Collin Morikawa and Harris English in the opening foursomes session when Data Golf rated them as the 132nd best possible American combination…out of 132. (Molinari smiles wanly from behind his laptop.) They showed no pulse in a lopsided defeat. No doubt Bradley would have loved to bench them, but they’re colleagues he has to see every week in the locker room and Keegan doesn’t want to be hated by his peers, especially a more accomplished player like Morikawa. The PGA stewards had put Bradley in an impossible situation. So Morikawa and English were sent out again in Saturday foursomes, lambs to the slaughter. Meanwhile, the all-business Donald felt no compunction in benching a struggling Rasmus Højgaard. Team first, always. And if Donald needed someone to reinforce the message, he could summon his magisterial vice captains, Bjorn or Jose Maria Olazabal, the grand old man of European golf who has been involved in the Ryder Cup since before Bradley was born.

To be sure, players still matter at the Ryder Cup. It remains debatable whether Europeans are better overall golfers than Americans, but there is zero doubt they are better at the Ryder Cup, largely because of their emotional investment. McIlroy set the tone for Bethpage two years ago at the victor’s press conference in Rome, when he pounded the dais and guaranteed a European victory. He’s been talking about the glory of a road win ever since. Scottie Scheffler has eclipsed McIlroy in 72-hole, stroke play events but he displayed none of the same passion looking ahead to the Ryder Cup. He seemed like a lot of the other Americans, who didn’t give much thought to Bethpage until it was upon them. McIlroy’s fiery leadership gave Europe its identity, along with Rahm’s hot-blooded intensity and Tommy Fleetwood’s relentless excellence. (By point percentage, they are all now among the half-dozen best European Ryder Cuppers of all time.) Scheffler, meanwhile, shrank from the moment, becoming the first player ever to go 0-4 in partner play. (He beat an exhausted McIlroy in singles, 1-up.) Everyone loves Scottie because he’s a nice guy, but it is spikier personalities who thrive at the Ryder Cup. Seve, obviously, but also Payne Stewart, Paul Azinger, Nick Faldo, Colin Montgomerie, Sergio Garcia. The U.S. team has a lot of nice guys.

With his performative theatrics, Bryson DeChambeau wants to the heartbeat of the Team USA, but it’s hard to earn that respect and emotional connection when you see your teammates only a few times a year. And DeChambeau didn’t exactly leave the PGA TOUR on good terms with his colleagues. “A lot of my time out there was difficult,” he told me. “I was trying to get on the [Player Advisory Committee] for six years, and it never happened. You get voted onto it by the other players, and nobody liked the way I thought. I felt I had an interesting perspective on a lot of issues, I’d love to have been part of it, but they didn’t want me.” He went 1-3-1 at Bethpage. The perpetual search for a team leader will have to wait at least two more years.

So where does the U.S. go from here? Woods is likely to be the captain in 2027, the 100 year anniversary of the first Ryder Cup. It is being played at Adare Manor in Ireland, owned by his close friend J.P. McManus. Woods should commit to a six-year term, for starters, at long last giving the U.S. stability at the top. He alone has the juice to demand a long overdue, wholesale reorganization of how the American Ryder Cup team operates. Control needs to be wrestled away from the lightweights at the PGA of America with the creation of an autonomous, year-round Team USA body. It can be overseen by Azinger, Steve Stricker and Davis Love—the only winning captains this century. But bring in other great leaders beyond the parochial borders of golf. Think Nick Saban, Mike Kryzyzewski, Joe Torre, Tara Vanderveer, Tom Brady, Michael Jordan. They need to establish a new culture and best practices that will be treated like holy scripture. Lean on the PGA Tour for cooperation in pairing together Ryder Cuppers and prospective team members. Tiger can run herd on regular practice round money games—alternate shot only!—and dinners at tournaments. Heck, even the occasional cornhole tournament on a Wednesday evening. A dedicated team of data scientists needs to work with agronomists and architects to set up home courses and assess road venues, helping the captain optimize both the growing of grass and composition of the roster.