It was the biggest liability with Jim Furyk’s Ryder Cup captaincy, and he’s hoping it might prove to be his greatest asset: he’s done this before, and he’s failed.
On Wednesday morning at the PGA Championship at Aronimink, the golf world heard from Furyk for the first time since taking the role of Ryder Cup captain for the second time. At the time it was announced, Furyk’s captaincy was met … tepidly, after he oversaw one of the U.S.’s most prolific Ryder Cup beatdowns with their 2018 loss in Paris.
Now, though, Furyk appears to have entered the lead spot as a changed man, and his message to the golf world reflects it.
“There’s not a problem of effort,” Furyk said. “There’s an issue of strategy and structure.”
Of course, we’ve done this before with Furyk — first at the 2017 PGA Championship at Quail Hollow, when he spoke about his hopes for a U.S. team that had been unsuccessful in previous Ryder Cup journeys across the pond. In that press conference, Furyk talked in broad terms about his learnings from prior captains, and his excitement for a young crop of stars led by Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas and Brooks Koepka.
This year, the picture isn’t quite as rosy. The Americans have lost two straight Ryder Cups without ever appearing particularly competitive, and the PGA of America’s role as tournament stewards has been called into open question. Furyk’s own ascendance to the captaincy only seemed to highlight the dearth of American leadership and the lack of a coherent plan.
But speaking from the dais on Wednesday morning, Furyk spoke with clarity about a host of issues he’s hoping to address — and changes he is hoping to effect — as the captain of the 2027 squad in Adare Manor. Let’s dive into each of them below.
It’s certainly not a surprise to anyone who’s watched the Ryder Cup over the last few years, but the Americans have some major work to do as it relates to alternate shot. The U.S. side has gotten smoked over the last several Ryder Cups in this category — 6-20 over the last three Cups, in Furyk’s estimation — which has dug a difficult hole for any team to climb out of.
Furyk indicated he’d be looking across a variety of pathways to fix the foursomes problem for the U.S. side, including the team’s current deployment of analytics and its roster construction and pairings during tournament week.
“It’s no secret that foursomes has been a glaring problem,” Furyk said. “Our team the last two Ryder Cups on Friday and Saturday, we’ve dug massive holes.”
One topic that seems to have captured Furyk’s attention in recent days is the Ryder Cup points system, which is used during the two-year window between Ryder Cups to determine the six automatic qualifiers for the U.S. team.
Furyk suggested the Americans are looking into changing the points system, perhaps shifting the emphasis to Cup years to ensure the auto-qualifiers are players in peak form.
“I think we’re going to probably end up doing a points system of some sort,” Furyk said. “But I’ve also got some ideas on how to do that. Nothing’s been determined.”
And if that shift might absolve this year’s events from the criteria altogether, even though we’re already nearly halfway into the season?
“This year may count. We might shorten the window as well,” Furyk said. “I don’t think there’s any issue with retroactive changes.”
The U.S. team increased its number of captain’s selections ahead of the 2021 Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits to great success, but drama around roster-building in the Cups since has led some to question whether six captain’s selections is too many (or too few).
Furyk sees no such issue, suggesting the current system helps identify the best players while leaving ample room for roster configuration.
The American analytics team — Scouts Inc. — came under direct fire for its roster-building methodology in 2025. At Bethpage, the Americans twice put out the pairing of Collin Morikawa and Harris English, which ranked dead-last in DataGolf’s pairings power rankings and seemed to work against conventional wisdom about both players’ form and competitive strengths. The Europeans, meanwhile, leaned on analytics guru Edoardo Molinari, whose roster decisions had the golden touch against the American side.
Furyk stayed away from criticizing the American analytics team at Scouts but suggested he would be making a decision about whether to move forward with the company in the next month.
“No decision has really been made at that point on the future, but one that will be made here in the next month for sure,” he said. “That’s my job.”
Still, even if Scouts stays in the fold, Furyk said it’s likely their role will be adjusted significantly.
“How we’ve applied them and, more importantly, how we’ve discussed that and how that communication has been with the players needs to get a lot better,” he said.
Furyk said the Americans will be looking to steal a page from the Euro playbook, pairing potential competitive partners together as soon as next spring.
“I tried to hint to it earlier in there that this needs to be a year-round, 12 months, 52 weeks a year, priority for us to improve,” Furyk said. “But we need to start a lot earlier as far as getting the players involved and buying in and we should be working on our pairings next spring. It’s getting an idea of who could possibly make the team and how the team is going to be involved. Every year we get earlier, but not early enough, if that makes sense to you.”
One of the key criticisms of American Ryder Cup leadership over the last decade is that there’s been a lack of it.
Today, there really isn’t a class of qualified American captains outside of Furyk, who is returning for a second captaincy, and Tiger Woods, who has mulled the last two Ryder Cup captaincies and ultimately turned both down. Though the focus remains on ’27, Furyk indicated he’d love to see that shift.
“I mean it’s really important for me and for Team USA to kind of identify possible future captains and get them involved,” Furyk said. “That’s why I’ve got Stewart [Cink] and Justin [Leonard] involved so early. I want them to be a part of the process. I want them to learn every aspect of what we’re doing and get some more experience, if that makes sense.
“Yeah, I’ve kept notes along the way that we talked about as captains, that we’ve talked about with our analytics team, how we’ve changed things, how we tried to evolve,” he continued. “This is something that we’ve been talking about in house for quite a while and it’s something that needs to happen.”
The Americans got repeatedly skewered by the Europeans in Bethpage for receiving payment for their participation in the Cup for the first time. (The Euros followed up that discussion by more than doubling the ticket prices for Adare Manor but still haven’t addressed the issue of player pay on their side.)
Furyk noted that the American side retained the charitable component of the Cup at Bethpage and should do a better job about communicating the ways that money is spent.
“I think where we’ve really missed and I really missed as a team is that we haven’t talked about well over $3.6 million donated to charity,” he said. “We haven’t told the stories. I think there’s a lot of players out there that don’t want to be like, hey, look at me, look what I did.”
The U.S. Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup leadership teams are technically different groups operated by different governing bodies (the PGA of America for the Ryder Cup; the PGA Tour for the Presidents Cup). One easy area of improvement Furyk spotlighted is continuity between the two sides, which have similar aspirations but have historically acted more divergently than anyone on either side of the ledger would hope.
Woods was a potential captain for the 2027 squad, and he’s certainly a future captain. Furyk said he hopes Woods will have a meaningful role of some kind on the ’27 team and that he intends to talk to the 15-time major champ about that role at some point in the near future.
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