What bothers me most about the continual Ryder Cup ass-poundings is not the fact that we keep getting embarrassed… it’s that we never have an answer for it. Tom Lehman can’t explain it, Tiger Woods can’t explain it, and Phil Mickelson for damn sure can’t explain anything.

We keep getting our asses kicked, in our soil, on their soil, when we’re favored, when we’re the underdogs… and no one can ever explain why.

Two theories I’m discounting are that we don’t care as much, or that we don’t want it as much. There’s just no way that’s true. Maybe there are certain individuals who don’t care a lot (and I don’t believe Tiger Woods is one of them, despite that finger always being pointed at him), but there’s no way I’m believing that this isn’t as vitally important to our guys as it as theirs. The way our players talk about it, the way they prepare themselves, the measures they’ve gone to… there’s too much evidence that this is very important to the our side.

And maybe that’s a part of the problem. You never hear about the European team taking a trip together to bond (as the Americans did in Ireland), because they don’t have to. You don’t hear about their coach’s strategy for putting together teams, you don’t see them sweating every little detail… they show up, slap some teams together, play golf, and take their trophy home. We don’t.

I’ll believe that the European team is a little more tightly-knit to begin with, that they like each other, are comfortable with each other, and enjoy spending time with each other. I’ll buy that as a theory. When they travel to American tournaments (which is way more frequent than American golfers traveling to European tournaments), a lot of them stay together, they hang out, they practice together… they like each other. They’re comfortable with each other. That probably makes a big difference.

Other than that… I couldn’t tell you. The European team just goes out and hits better shots. There’s a reason for that somewhere, but no one seems to know what the hell it is. Maybe the Europeans have some kind of a strategy or gameplan that they protect as well as Colonel Sanders protects his chicken recipe. I don’t know.

Or, and this is a theory that I like… maybe we just need to leave Phil Mickelson behind. Ol’ FIGJAM was the worst player in the event (Brett Wetterich gets a pass, because nothing was expected out of him, mainly because he’s Brett Wetterich), getting only ½ of a point in five tries, which puts him at 1-9-1 in his last 11 Ryder Cup matches.

The team selection process will almost certainly be reworked, and that’s fine. But I don’t think we need fewer captain’s selections, I think we need more. And I think we need two optional “captain’s deselections,” where the captain can choose to take someone in the Top 10 in the point standings, and tell them to stay the fuck home. I am looking at you, Phil Mickelson. I hate your insincere smile, no one else on tour likes you, and you suck at being part of a team.

Here’s the breakdown of the American team: