RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesThere are bad problems, and there are good problems, and Brandt Snedeker has a whole bunch of the latter.
In less than 50 days, the 2026 Presidents Cup will get underway at Medinah Country Club, where the U.S. team will look to defeat the Internationals for the 11th straight time. Snedeker, the captain of the U.S. side, will have six of his 12 players selected for him via automatic qualifying, and then comes the inevitable difficult decisions surrounding his six captain's picks to round out his team.
With the Presidents Cup being both entirely lopsided and a gargantuan rung below the Ryder Cup on the ladder of significance, there is always pressure for a youth movement to be embraced by the U.S. team. Snedeker may be facing that pressure more than any other captain in the Cup's 30-year history, but he isn't succumbing to it, at least not yet.
Those pressures of bringing the 'kids' along to Medinah became as obvious as ever before over the past two weeks with 21-year-old Jackson Koivun winning the 3M Open in just his third start as a professional and 24-year-old Michael Thorbjornsen winning the Rocket Classic for his maiden PGA Tour victory .
Given Koivun's insanely impressive amateur and college career at Auburn and his nearly-immediate win on Tour, much of the golf world went ahead and wrote his name in Sharpie to be named to the Presidents Cup team. Thorbjornsen's name has been penciled in, although he's been sneakily fantastic in his short PGA Tour career.
Snedeker played a practice round with Koivun ahead of this week's Wyndham Championship , and while he praised his game and called him a "generational" player, he made it clear his strategy as captain does not involve bringing on youth for the sake of bringing on youth.
"I don't ever really look at it like we have to change things or do things different. I think the golf dictates who needs to be on the team. I'm not into, 'oh, let's just take a young kid because we need a young kid on the team,'" Snedeker said on Tuesday.
"That doesn't make any sense to me. I think you take the best players who give you the best opportunity of winning. I don't think -- you can't discount what people have done and you can't -- it's really hard to forecast how guys are going to handle those kinds of things. You look at how they've played, what they're capable of, what their ceiling is, what their basement is, what their floor is and kind of go from there."
Snedeker's comments represent the polar opposite viewpoints that leadership in place and golf fans have when looking at the Presidents Cup, but that doesn't mean what he had to say about the situation is wrong.
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From a fan's perspective, and it's an understandable one, the Presidents Cup is a warm-up event for the Ryder Cup. With that mindset, why wouldn't Koivun be given a spot on the U.S. team and get match-play reps at the Presidents Cup, when it's assumed he will play his way onto the very short list of players who could represent the red, white, and blue at the 2027 Ryder Cup?
It's a fair question, especially when the U.S. Ryder Cup team has lost nine of the last 12 Ryder Cups dating back to the turn of the century, and needs to (must) try a new approach in 2027.
While Snedeker absolutely wants to see the U.S. team go to Ireland and upset Team Europe in 2027, that is not part of his job description as this year's Presidents Cup captain.
Snedeker's lone objective is putting together the best 12-player roster he can to avoid becoming just the second U.S. captain to ever lose the Presidents Cup. That could, and more likely than not will, include taking Koivun and other young, up-and-coming players to Medinah, but it shouldn't be an absolute certainty simply because there is a Ryder Cup to be played 12 months down the road and those players may be in the mix to make that team.
I'll join the masses and go on record in saying Koivun should be on the U.S. Presidents Cup team, but I also understand that Snedeker is not in the future-telling business; he's in the business of winning the Presidents Cup, and anything that may come after that shouldn't take over the decision-making process for the first-time captain.
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