There's been much debate over the last fortnight and indeed throughout much of the year as to exactly what makes for exciting golf. Big names seems a popular ingredient, and whenever a leaderboard lacks them, you'll find concerns about that. Good golf courses is a demand which by nature is harder to define, and it can be argued that the link between quality of course and quality of finish is tenuous at best (see: the FedEx Cup Playoffs so far). Some maintain that the size of the purse is particularly significant, whereas there's less debate as to the importance of prestige.

Ultimately, we are talking about an unpredictable sport where pretty much anything can happen and where perfect isn't meant to exist. Take the Open, for example. This year brought us high drama between some of the biggest names covering almost all corners of the globe, with Tiger Woods' emotional walk down the 18th on Friday thrown in for good measure. Still, some felt the Old Course was too easy. When it was more difficult, in 2010, no doubt the runaway nature of Louis Oosthuizen's win left some feeling short-changed. It really is a strange and difficult world at times.

By now you may be wondering how this relates to the TOUR Championship, where the FedEx Cup shall be decided. Fair question. I suppose what I'm getting towards is that we never know what a tournament will produce, but our best chance of something memorable depends on certain fundamentals. History and prestige are here, at East Lake, an old and storied golf course in Georgia. Money? There's plenty of that. Professional pride, too – whoever does win this title will in some way be worthy of it, and will be a strong candidate to be named Player of the Year. Many of the best players in golf make up the 30-man field.

But there is one way that the PGA Tour has compromised the likelihood of excitement, and that's with the introduction of a handicap scoring system which means the world number one gets a two-shot head-start, and that half of the field are almost certainly out of the tournament before it has started. Introduced in 2019, it has so far robbed us of real Sunday drama in two of the three subsequent renewals, and I don't recall feeling a particular sense of jeopardy even last year, when Patrick Cantlay ultimately won by a single shot from Jon Rahm, the only two players who had a realistic chance throughout the week.

That's the price they've paid, and it's not quite for nothing. There can be absolutely no doubt that the TOUR Championship is easier to follow, and a winner-takes-all conclusion makes some degree of sense. Sometimes, though, I wonder if professional golf and those in charge of it spend too much time trying to soften its idiosyncrasies rather than celebrating what makes it special. And in terms of this tournament specifically, I wonder whether the scoring system really has helped to attract a new audience which was hitherto alienated by the complexities of an undeniably hard-to-follow points system.

Those flaws were exposed again on Sunday, when Sky Sports were unable to tell us what significance, if any, was attached to Xander Schauffele's birdie putt on the final hole of the BMW Championship. When he missed, one commentator said 'we'll never know' what would've happened had it gone in, when in fact we actually knew moments later thanks to Justin Ray, who revealed that had Schauffele holed his putt, his friend Cantlay would've had the head-start here at East Lake which instead goes to Scottie Scheffler.

From the outset, failures in the FedEx Cup can largely be called failures in communication, and by switching to this system my belief is that we're pandering to those unwilling or unable to interpret two things at once.