With the FedEx finale on the PGA Tour at East Lake in Atlanta and the Tour Championship now over, it’s a good time to look at the other annual race – PGA Tour Player of the Year. The playoff win by Bill Haas did nothing to clarify the likely choice for the title.

The personality of the 2011 PGA Tour schedule is the absence of dominance. The numbers are startling. The schedule shows thirty-five different players have picked up Tour titles this year. Only five players have posted more than one win, and they are all tied at the impressive total of two.

It’s been twenty years since Fred Couples earned POY honors with only a couple of wins on the calendar. In 1991, seven other players joined Couples with a pair of wins. To put that interval in perspective, 1991 was the year golf was introduced to rookie major winner, John Daly.

So if it isn’t wins that winnow the choices for top players recognition, what about those who have distinguished themselves with major wins – Charl Schwartzel, the Masters; Rory McIlroy, U.S. Open; Darren Clarke, Open Championship; and Keegan Bradley, PGA Championship? The first three are not members of the PGA Tour and are ineligible, and Bradley is one of the quintet who has cashed two winner’s checks.

Those major champions all have something else in common for 2011. Since winning their majors, none of them have won again (Bradley’s first win was prior to his PGA Championship). In fact, the eight different major winners in the last two years have amassed a total of six additional wins since, five overseas and one by Phil Mickelson on the Tour.

Recently, I was told that a very respected and seasoned local observer of the PGA Tour commented that he couldn’t recall the last time the game had so many “great” young players. I responded I could accept the statement if we switched the adjective from “great” to “good.”

Much has been made that this new breed of twenty something’s are no longer intimidated by Tiger Woods being in the field. I can understand their comfort, given Woods currently diminished game, but let me suggest that the Woods of only four years ago might have made it to double figures in wins for the year against this same ‘talent rich’ generation.

Woods lowest win total in his ten Player of the Year runs has been four. That came in his rookie season of 1997. In 2008 when Vijay Singh broke Tiger’s stranglehold on the crown he did it by virtue of Woods absence as much as his own performance. That was the year Woods was sidelined for the balance of the year after winning four times, the last coming on a broken leg at the U.S. Open.

I wish I could recall the first time I made the statement that the great and dominant twelve-year run of Tiger Woods didn’t persuade me that he could lay claim to the title of best ever player in the game. I said then and repeat now that even if Woods should recapture his magic and go on to surpass Nicklaus’ 18 major win total, he will have done it against the most mediocre crop of golfers in my lifetime. Some say the PGA Tour is a deep pool of talents that can win in any given week. I would argue that those same waters in the pool barely come up to your ankles when we talk about greatness.

We can hope that McIlroy and Bradley and Kaymer and Johnson and Watson and Donald and the like mature as talents and bring their skills to the table more consistently than we saw in 2011. But my vote for Player of the Year honors is to call it a tie.

NOTE: This year’s absence of multiple winners presents a significant challenge to next year’s first major – the Masters. Having restored its automatic exemption to winners on the PGA Tour, if the “winner of the week” trend continues for the start of the 2012 season, the Masters is looking at the likelihood of a field in excess of one hundred players, and with its one tee start on the first two days, the committee is looking at challenges getting those rounds complete even without weather considerations.

It would not be surprising to see an announcement from Augusta in the future about new qualifying standards to be a part of the first major of the year.

Dan Reardon is Golf Editor at KMOX.  He can be heard throughout the week on America’s Sports Voice.