OK, it’s been a week. We’ve all had a chance to decompress. The Europeans have fulsomely celebrated their 2025 Ryder Cup win, as is their well-earned right, to the tune of a roughly $300,000 bar bill (Cup-clinching hero Shane Lowry was seemingly responsible for $270,000 of that). The American side has cycled through the stages of grief, and the PGA of America has officially (and finally) apologized for everything that was appalling about fan behavior at Bethpage Black.
With a fresh slate and clear eyes, it is time for us to put our heads together and figure out what steps can be taken to fix the U.S. Ryder Cup team. Let’s not sugarcoat it: The situation has become untenable. The Europeans have now won nine of the last 12 Ryder Cups. This entire first quarter of the century has been an exercise in lacerating subjugation, in an event we dominated for decades. The Euros win and win with flair. They win there; they win here. Brimming with suave European sophistication, they make rubes of us. Somehow, this has got to stop. Here are eight ways to start that process.
Step 1: Roll your sleeves up and get to work.
The U.S. team used to dominate the Ryder Cup. We were a brutal, ass-kicking machine. And now look at us. Soft. Compliant. Make what you will of the Sunday comeback by the American squad, but the broad picture is this: insufficient. In two years, we will be charged with doing the very thing that Rory McIlroy described this way: “I think winning an away Ryder Cup, it’s up there with one of the biggest achievements in the game, especially nowadays.” (And then he did it.)
It’s a tough challenge! Did you know the European team has already identified the best possible four-ball pairings for the future squads at Adare Manor in County Limerick, Ireland? Of course that’s not actually true. But that is the sort of cadence the European team tends to run on. These people are very technocratic in efficient ways. As my editor, Matt Dollinger, put it to me: “This can’t be a six-week sprint anymore.” Part of the success of European captain Luke Donald’s plan at Bethpage Black involved familiarizing his team with every intricacy of the course through mandatory, low-stakes, low-stress group trips to New York for practice rounds. Had Napoleon simply planned a few practice rounds in Russia, we would still be wearing tall and funny hats. By which I mean: Whoever is named captain should be making twice-a-year trips with the team to Adare Manor over the next two years. It would require the Americans to take time away from their busy schedule of depositing millions a week into their nontaxable Swiss escrow accounts, but it might really help! They should do this.
Step 2: Improve the process for choosing a captain.
I have heard it both ways this past week: Bring Keegan Bradley back as a captain, or don’t. As far as that goes, I guess it depends on how you look at the situation. The first two days of the 2025 Ryder Cup were dreadful in a Tobe Hooper horror movie way, featuring almost too much carnage. And then suddenly, day three turned into John Milius’s Red Dawn, and the Americans kind of almost came back and won. They still lost. I personally have my doubts that Bradley was a good captain—hell, even Bradley has his doubts about being a good captain. It’s a very hard job!
Whatever is decided, it doesn’t change the fact that the process for choosing Bradley in the first place was profoundly flawed. The short version is that the PGA of America was reportedly desperate to have Tiger Woods take the job, and that following 2023’s thrashing in Rome, he was noncommittal but also didn’t say no. This went on for a while. Then he finally said no and left the U.S. with few options fairly deep into the process, so the PGA of America pivoted quickly to the surprise choice of … Bradley. He didn’t even interview for the job. This is no way to run anything.
Look, I get the appeal of having Woods as captain: the greatest golfer of all time, broken down but with old fire still burning, galvanizing a moribund Ryder Cup squad to be its best self. “A Tiger in Winter.” This shit writes itself. It would be great for me, personally. The problem is, every day you wait around for the famously ambivalent Woods to make a decision is one more day you are falling behind the rigorously disciplined European Ryder Cup apparatus, which has already probably made crucial decisions about 2029. Don’t fall into the Woods trap again, and, for the love of God, make a timely decision.
Some say we should bring in an outside hand, someone not in the golf ecosystem—essentially the Ted Lasso theory. “Some” includes Phil Mickelson, golf’s consummate philosopher king. His two coaching recommendations are Lou Holtz and Coach K, which raises the question: What kind of time warp is he existing in?
Step 3: Seriously embrace analytics.
It seems like no serious sports organization in the world could meaningfully not employ deep-dive analytics in 2025, but that appears to have happened last week. Donald and his tech-savant vice-captain, Edoardo Molinari, had spent long nights crafting a plan for everything from pairings to course metrics to the smallest integers and margins that can represent the thin difference in high-level stroke play. On the other hand, certain statistical models said that Bradley’s bonkers pairing of Harris English and Collin Morikawa (which he rolled out not once but twice!) was the worst conceivable four-ball pairing out of 132 possible options on both sides. In a stunning twist, they lost both matches. I love a “gut feel” too, but the house always wins.
Step 4: Figure out the team chemistry issues.
Like a haunted family history, this goes back a while. Ego clashes between American players have proved fatal in Ryder Cups, from the days of the tragic Tiger Woods–Phil Mickelson four-ball pairing in 2004 to Patrick Cantlay’s (alleged) refusal to wear a hat he wasn’t compensated for two years ago. I will resist the urge to test my sociological acumen here and simply observe that something frequently seems to undermine the American team’s morale, and thus its overall chances.
I will list here a regimen of Donald’s team-rapport-building gestures this year: He got his team VR headsets equipped with audio of abusive fan heckling, intended to normalize the headwinds they would be facing. He had them all fly in a week early to play Bethpage Black to counteract his team’s jet lag. He even upgraded the shampoo in the showers. Dude thought of everything.
A less-remembered but crucial impasse in the punk-rock tennis great John McEnroe’s career was a borderline pathological commitment to the Davis Cup, the mostly forgotten but once significant international competition. He was a punk and a patriot in equal measure. He probably lost a lot of his competitive career to those beat-up, hard-court nights, but he emerged a legend. Who’s our McEnroe? Or, who, at least, is our Robert MacIntyre?
Step 5: Get more out of your best players.
And by the way, it isn’t like the sought-after, would-be captain Tiger Woods fared that great in the Ryder Cup! Thirteen wins, 21 losses, and three ties—nothing to write home about for a career match-play destroyer. A slight but accumulating sense of disappointment has also begun to gather around Woods’s so-far greatest inheritor of PGA Tour dominance, Scottie Scheffler. In Rome two years ago, Scottie literally cried after a four-ball beatdown. At Bethpage, he didn’t earn his first point until a climactic and dramatic duel with McIlroy, resulting in a 1-4 record overall. Leaders gotta lead, and old hands Justin Rose and Jon Rahm rallied their troops again and again. Scheffler, on the other hand, was a functional nonfactor. But it isn’t like you can bench him. Through the Sturm und Drang, I thought constantly of Bradley’s dilemmas.
I mean, I think it is hard to be the U.S. Ryder Cup captain. And by that, I mean the position immediately intrudes into a historic and fraught place. Tom Watson, Davis Love III—so few seem to come out of this crucible enhanced. I wonder if we don’t get the best out of our best players because they are so self-assured and so dedicated to their routines that they can’t be coached. I think of Larry Bird and how he was never going to be able to successfully sustain an NBA coaching career because he literally couldn’t grasp why his players weren’t just better.
Step 6: Improve your captain’s picks.
By orders of magnitude, the six captain’s picks are the great deciding factor in every Ryder Cup. It’s always weird, because someone who could have plausibly been chosen gets left out, and a surfeit of hurt feelings ensues. This is pro golf. And still, you must make hard choices. For the second consecutive Cup, Donald’s mixture of young and old held the fort. On the other hand, most of Bradley’s picks, save for the magnificent Cameron Young, crashed and burned. I suppose the dangling question in a two-point-decided match is what might have happened if Bradley had bet on himself as the first playing captain since Arnold Palmer in 1963. He couldn't have done worse than the desultory Ben Griffin, who earned one point and then got benched.
Then there’s the envelope. If you are a Ryder Cup obsessive, you know exactly what I mean, but if you aren’t, welcome to the “envelope rule.” This came into play on Sunday morning, when Viktor Hovland turned up with a bum neck. Per the envelope rule, each captain places a name in an envelope, and should a player from one team become injured, the other team will reveal their name in the envelope, that player will sit out, and the point will be split. Harris English, the automatic qualifier, didn’t make much sense as Bradley’s pick for the envelope, and his selection revealed something crucial about Bradley’s doubts about his team.
Step 7: Figure out what to do with Bryson DeChambeau.
The first thunderous stroke at the 2025 Ryder Cup occurred when DeChambeau hammered a driver down to chipping distance on no. 1’s green. It was early, and the crowd was motley but invigorated. It was something like 7:15 a.m., but 3 a.m. somewhere. He pulled the big stick, 344 down the pike. Now the motley crew exploded. But it was downhill from there, which is a steep downhill if you’re starting at 7:15 a.m. Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton eventually crushed DeChambeau and Justin Thomas 4-3. So it mostly went for DeChambeau until it was too late, when he kind of lamely tied a must-win match with Matt Fitzpatrick on Sunday.
Hard to know what to make of the guy at this point. So odd and preening, with his strained facsimile of manliness. You want to cast scorn, and then it occurs to you: Has this person ever had friends? Way back in the day, I wrote about the Bryson-Brooks contretemps, and in retrospect it seems like Brooks was straight up bullying Bryson.
I’ll confess I find Bryson irritating, too, but still thrilling to watch. You truly never know what he is going to do. All the equipment changes, the narratives, the measurements. Just strange. Is he the kind of guy you need to make your future plans around? That could be tougher to admit. Then again, I long ago learned that the things that make men different make them special. I guess I am excited to see him in two years.
Step 8: Chill out?
I like Justin Thomas just fine, but there’s too much gesticulating when he holes a lengthy putt, even when he’s way behind in a match. A subjective matter, I’ll admit. But you know why John Riggins and Barry Sanders used to casually toss every touchdown run to the referee? Because it’s cooler to act like you’ve been there before. The U.S. team hasn’t been there for a while.
Tiger’s fist pump meant something 89 times on tour. The overwhelmed American team’s constant attempts at riling up the New York crowd felt almost uncomfortably demonstrative, and the results were atrocious: a mid-level comedian crashed her career against the rocky shoals of Bethpage’s unconscionable bullshit; McIlroy’s wife was the subject of beyond-the-pale heckling and actual assault; Bethpage eventually called the police on itself. The sad thing is that being patriotic used to be fun, but the Ryder Cup made the U.S. just seem mean and lame. Here’s what we are winning on right now: those fans who, incredibly, still scream “mashed potatoes” on the tee; flyover enthusiasts; and Bryson truthers. Here’s what we’re losing: every Ryder Cup.
How about this: no bragging, no antics, no pointless jingoism. Just a full-fledged commitment to bringing the Cup home in approximately 710 days. A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.