Keegan Bradley confronts the strange challenges of Ryder Cup roster-building

When you think about it, Keegan Bradley says, Ryder Cup roster-building isn’t all that difficult.

Not that the U.S. Ryder Cup captain is diminishing the high-wire act of picking the 12 best American golfers at any given time. (Trust him, he’s been on the wrong side of the ledger often enough to know.) It’s just that ultimately, the job is just that: To pick the 12 best American golfers.

“I just want the 12 best players,” he said, over and over again, during his introductory press conference as team captain in New York last month, a point he has reiterated a handful of times in the months since.

The problem, as it were, isn’t Bradley’s intention. It’s his application. Every Ryder Cup captain wants to find the best 12 players, but the act of selecting them is entirely subjective. Is the point to find the 12 best players over the 24 months preceding the Ryder Cup, as the entirely arbitrary “points system” suggests? Or is it to find the 12 players most apt to win the Cup for the Americans, as the “captain’s picks” selections suggest? Is it to maximize your chances of winning points, as the analytics suggest? Or to work the team room into a well-oiled machine, as the team-building proponents suggest?

The truth, as almost everyone understands, is that being a Ryder Cup captain means accepting that your 12 best players will be an amalgam of each of these groups’ selections. And, to Bradley’s credit, he’s already displayed the most important quality in a Ryder Cup captain: adaptability.

Bradley appeared on Barstool’s Fore Play podcast this week to discuss his first month as Ryder Cup captain, and during the course of the interview was asked about some of his more controversial opinions. (He has suggested that he might change the system regarding captain’s picks and automatic selections — saying he might opt for a world in which the top eight players made it automatically on the U.S. team, instead of just the top six.)

In his Fore Play interview, though, Bradley admitted his opinion has already shifted.

“I just think, you do six and six, the way it’s done, [I think] if you finish seventh or eighth on the list, you should be on the team,” Bradley said. “But then I came to the realization of: if I’m in charge of choosing the team, if I think seven and eight should be on the team, then I can just do that, so there’s no real point in changing it.”

So perhaps there won’t be a wholesale change to the way the Ryder Cup roster is created, but what is Bradley thinking about when it comes to developing the team room? Is he considering a world in which only the top point-getters wind up on the team? If he is, what does that mean for LIV’s players, who will inevitably earn fewer points than their PGA Tour counterparts?

“I am of the firm belief that I want the best players in the team,” Bradley said. “Next year at this time, who knows what we’re looking at here, in terms of LIV-PGA Tour. I’m in no private conversations, I know nothing. I think I owe it to the team to have the best players on the team. Now that could mean LIV players, it could mean it doesn’t. It’s gonna depend on who’s ready to go.”

It doesn’t take a sharp listener to detect that Bradley is avoiding any sweeping generalizations with his roster selection. As far as this writer is concerned, that’s damn smart.

The golf world has shown us over the last several years that it is unusually prone to sudden, rapid change. Often that change has involved the shape of LIV and the PGA Tour, but shifts in playing form (Justin Thomas, Bryson DeChambeau) have been just as prevalent. The best 12 players on the U.S. side today may be wildly different from what that list will look like 12 months from now. In fact, that’s very likely.

Bradley would be a fool to dismiss LIV carte blanche, especially after the season that Bryson DeChambeau had in 2024, but he would be equally foolish to guarantee a roster spot to anyone with so much time left before the first tee shots are struck at Bethpage Black.

There might not be a satisfying roster-building strategy hidden in that non-answer, but there is a revealing piece of Bradley’s approach to the captaincy.

“I know there’s guys on LIV who are motivated to win the Ryder Cup. I have no idea how that’s going to shake out, I just want the 12 best players.”

In other words, nothing is certain until the rosters are written in ink.

Bradley knows a thing or two about that.

You can listen to Bradley’s whole interview with Dan Rapaport here.