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Bobby Jones once said that, “golf is a game that is played on a five-inch course – the distance between your ears,” and while that is very true, it’s another area of the body that landed an entire Lutheran college golf team in serious trouble.

The Bethany College men’s golf team took a page out of Golf Digest’s spread of the 2004 UCLA team and posed in the buff for an unofficial team photo (above), with just golf clubs covering their man parts, and it didn’t sit well with the team’s coach, who also happens to be the religious school’s athletic director.

Jon Daniels suspended every player on the Fighting Swedes for three tournaments because of the photo he called, “a case of young people who just don’t think beyond the moment and don’t realize who they’re hurting.”

“Until someone sat them down and explained that they did something wrong, they didn’t have any idea,” Daniels said. “But I think they understand now.”

Daniels first caught sight of the photo in his inbox, and immediately went to the team that has won 11 of the last 15 Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference titles and told them they’d all be sidelined for the next three events because of their decision to shoot this picture.

And how did the photo get leaked in the first place? Facebook, of all places, by one of the players in the picture. Where was the elderly player to mention to the others that this was a bad idea? Apparently nowhere, since the team has exactly zero seniors on the roster.

Team captain Jack Hiscock told KAKE news that the team is appealing the suspension.

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Welcome to Teeing Off, where Devil Ball editor Jay Busbee and head writer Shane Bacon take a day’s topic and smack it all over the course. Suggest a future topic by writing jay.busbee@yahoo.com, or hit us on Twitter at @jaybusbee and @shanebacon. Today, we begin the FedEx Cup talk with … excitement?

Busbee: Here we are at the FedEx Cup playoffs, and who’s going to win? I have absolutely no idea, and that’s exactly what could make this year’s version of the playoffs the most worthwhile yet. Let’s be honest, the PGA Tour’s experiment in creating a “postseason” has drawn wide criticism, some justified, some just flat-out griping because it’s something different. But this year, with the field open, there’s something really on the line week-to-week, and I gotta confess … I’m looking forward to it. You?

Bacon: It’s strange to say, but I’m actually looking forward to it as well, for exactly those reasons. The year has been a complete toss up, and for some of the postseason accolades, the FedEx Cup will be influential in stamping those.

But, I ask, is this playoff system still working? Do people care, or would they watch these tournaments anyway?

Busbee: I think that the playoff system is the ONLY way to inject interest into a lot of these late-season tournaments beyond the golf hardcores. Football is beginning, and that vacuums up the Saturdays and Sundays of every casual sports fan on the planet. There’s a natural progression to the golf season that seems to crest right around the British Open, with the PGA Championship starting the slide toward fall. The playoffs provide a way to at least slow that descent in interest, and if we could have two or three known guys bust out early and challenge for this, we’ll have a fine few weeks. In short: putting something more at stake than just a trophy for the Random Insurance Company Classic will always draw at least a measure more interest.

Bacon: But like tennis’ U.S. Open, wouldn’t it be smarter to start the playoffs directly after the PGA? I mean, give people something to watch BEFORE football? That’s always been interesting to me, because it would be good to go from the last major of the year to the playoffs, almost like the end of the regular season draws a lot of interest into Wild Card weekend. Like you said, when NFL/college starts, people stop caring about golf, so why not toss one of your marquee events into the face of sports fans when they still have nothing else to watch?

Busbee: That’s a good point. Of course, that would give the PGA the leverage for determining who gets into the playoffs, which wouldn’t sit well with the PGA Tour, which has enough frustration with the fact that it doesn’t control any of the majors. Schedule-wise, I’m just not sure how to handle it without either compacting the FedEx Cup into fewer events, or just accepting that you’re going to run into the NFL/NCAA buzzsaw. If they’re going to do it this way, I don’t see any other option to what they’re already doing: begin promoting this thing in January with the hope that everyone will stick around through September. You?

Bacon: But you’re missing two open weeks, with Greensboro not being included in the event (or moved to another time slot) and the bye week between the Duetsche Bank and the BMW (still one of the strangest things on the schedule each year). Why not make it three weeks of great golf, with the grind being part of the playoffs (Aren’t playoffs supposed to take a toll on your body?), and the final wrapping up right when football kicks off.

Busbee: I agree: stupid off week. I still think politics would be the reason for the distance, and grousing by the players would be the reason for the off week, but hey … desperate times. Still, unfortunate scheduling or no, we should be in for some tense moments. And here’s hoping we’ve got two guys on the tee at 18 at East Lake with $10 million on the line. This year, more than ever, it could happen.

All right, you’re away. Are you looking forward to the FedEx Cup? Have your say!

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It’s been a weird year on the PGA Tour. A very, very weird year. One of those years that will leave golf historians scratching their heads when they look back 50 years from now at 2011 and wonder just what the heck went on.

But is it the strangest season in golf history? It sure seems like that on paper.

First and foremost, for only the second time in the post-World War II era, all four winners of the majors were first-time major winners. Keegan Bradley won his first ever start in a major at the PGA Championship, becoming just the third player to ever do that, and became the first player to ever win a major with a long-putter, a device that has been around for nearly 30 years.

On top of that, we had a youngster win the U.S. Open by eight shots, a no-name win the Masters with birdies on the final four holes, something that had never happened before, and a 42-year-old Irishman take home the Open Championship. Speaking of Ireland, for the third time in the last six majors, a Northern Irishman claimed victory at a major, a place with a population similar to the state of Nebraska.

But it wasn’t just the majors. Look at some of the stats for the other PGA Tour tournaments this year.

There have been eight rookie winners on the PGA Tour this year, the most since 1970, and 12 first-time winners so far this season, meaning that a lot of guys are seeing the fact that the tour is wide open and pouncing on it.

Stranger than that? The lack of dominance from the big names on tour. Tiger Woods hasn’t won since 2009. Phil Mickelson has just one win this year. Nobody on tour has more than two wins all year, and names like Dustin Johnson, Matt Kuchar, Jason Day and Hunter Mahan haven’t found the winner’s circle in 2011.

Probably the strangest part of the year has been dealing with what to expect from Woods, who has been in contention, hurt, sidelined and eventually returned for a brief stint that saw him break 70 just once in six rounds before he disappeared after a PGA Championship missed cut, the first of his career, only to announce he might return to the, wait for it, Fall Series! Oh, and Tiger missed out on the playoffs. That’s not normal.

And what about the playoffs? For a while, it seemed every tournament was ending in a playoff, highlighted by a run from the Heritage to the St. Jude that saw six of eight tournaments decided in extra time.

Who is leading the FedEx Cup right now? A guy that missed two of four cuts in majors this year. Who is one of the five two-time winners on tour this season? A 36-year-old guy named Mark Wilson, that most have never heard of until his great play in Phoenix. And a guy that wears two gloves and swings like he’s doing the Dougie has been in contention not once, not twice but three times this season.

Sergio Garcia returned to good form. Adam Scott reinvented himself with a new putter and Tiger’s caddie, and Davis Love III decided to start playing some great golf again before he captains the 2012 Ryder Cup team.

The U.S. Open was too easy, and the PGA Championship was too hard. The British was decided by a lay-up on a par-5 by one of the longest hitters in the game, the Players by a short putt missed by one of the steadiest putters in golf, and the PGA by a guy named Dufner playing the last four holes like his namesake.

We will remember 2011 as the year Tiger’s legacy really came into question, the short putter finally was defeated, and the most popular golf club in the world was a white-headed driver.

It’s been strange, but maybe even stranger than it all is with four tournaments left, we have absolutely no idea what to make of any of this. Maybe for the first time ever, the FedEx Cup playoffs really do matter. That could be the strangest of them all.

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Michelle Wie is the golf equivalent of a political litmus test: you believe what you’re going to believe about her, and no amount of evidence to the contrary is going to change your mind. So when Annika Sorenstam suggested at the U.S. Women’s Open in July that Wie was doing a disservice to the game of golf by focusing too much on college, the Wie detractors nodded in preach on, sister affirmation.

“I think her focus, in my opinion, should be more on golf,” Sorenstam said at the time. “She’s very distracted with school, doesn’t really play as much full time as I thought she would. I think she needs to come out here and compete more regularly.” The she dropped the hammer: “You wonder if she’s mentally strong enough to finish at the top.”

Ouch. That’s the worst kind of critique: calling into question both your judgment and your mental strength. Wie spoke with the Los Angeles Times about Sorenstam’s comments, and her response was, well, pretty much the weakest route to take: “I think everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.”

Aw, come on, Michelle! Look, obviously she can’t go out and scorch Sorenstam, one of golf’s immortals. But in the larger sense, we’re on Wie’s side on this one. If she wants to get her degree at one of the finest schools in the country, so be it. The sports world is full of phenoms who bailed on school early and were ill-prepared for the house-of-mirrors freak show that is professional athletics; anybody that willfully chooses that route to stay grounded needs commendation, not criticism.

“I’m making my own decisions,” she said, “and going to Stanford was something I needed to do for myself. It was not a decision made for my golf career, it was really solely a decision I made. It’s been one of the first things in my life I did for myself.”

Bingo. Plus, she’s managed to reach 14th in the world, not bad for a full-time college student. She’s scheduled to graduate in the spring, and at that point she’ll be a deserving target for the full-on “win or else” treatment. Till then, let her have the last few months of time to herself she’ll have for, oh, the next decade or so.

Michelle Wie defends decision to mix college and golf [LA Times]

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