The 2012 PGA Tour Playoffs have been an absolute success so far and this week’s Tour Championship at Atlanta’s historic East Lake is set to be a weekend full of drama.

A win by Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Nick Watney or Brandt Snedeker will pay them a cool $11.44 million and give them the FedEx Cup. It certainly is not a bad way to end the year by any stretch for the best on the PGA Tour. With only 30 players in the field this week, a win by anyone and some lucky bad finishes by the top five could give the entire field as shot at the $10 million prize and winning the Cup.

Still, there seems to be something missing from this process that gives this incredible five week stretch of golf the absolute sense of being a true playoff. It is tough to take a sport that features over 150 players teeing it off on a Thursday at a resort all year the look and feel of an October night at Yankee Stadium or a cold January afternoon at Lambeau Field.

Part of the problem is that for the casual fan the biggest attention getters are the four majors and they are all run by other organizations besides the PGA Tour. While for most golf fans the Tour season is a big deal, it is really not for those whose annual golf experience is watching the back nine on Sunday at Augusta National and hacking it around a driving range a couple times a summer.

The other big part of the problem is the calendar. Because most tournaments are set in stone by sponsors and television, the end of the season now runs smack dab against the start of the National Football League season here in the United States and the start of the premier soccer leagues in Europe. Not only are Rory and Tiger competing against each other for all this money, but are competing for attention against your fantasy football team. The fantasy football team is going to win every time no matter just how fantastic the play on the course has been. Trust me, that play has been magnificent and whoever wins this week will have written one hell of a story.

Now, that the PGA Tour has established how important this stretch is for their players, they need to tweak things a bit to get the fans a bit more into it. When we examine the television ratings of other sport’s playoffs, we need to remember that there is more and more casual interest as we go further along—putting the World Series or NBA Finals into 30 million homes or the Super Bowl into 75 million.

While expecting the last rounds of the PGA Tour season to draw those kinds of numbers is not realistic, there are a couple things they can do to. They can shorten the length of the playoffs and they can move schedules around so tournaments do not run against the NFL.

Four weeks of intense golf spread out over a five week period is too much. With firm commitments from BMW and Coca-Cola for the last two events, they obviously are not going anywhere. If they could convince either Barclays or Deutsche Bank, on the other hand, to take a better spot on the schedule in May and keep an elite field or even rotate them, then we would have a three week event that would see some true field reductions each week. Under this system, we would go from 125 to 70 to the last 30.

The Tour can configure how to do points to give anyone a chance to advance, but protect those in the top 10 from crashing out at least the first week. The main reason that these playoffs are not decided by match play—besides money and sponsorships—is because there would be no guarantee of any big named reaching the final. The difference in ability between the Rory McIlroy’s and Robert Garrigus’ of the world is real, but they are not that pronounced. A big name losing his first round match is not a surprise and is very bad for television.

The other more obvious thing they can do is schedule around the NFL. There is no reason to be having any of these events on the same time as the NFL is playing on a Sunday. With the smaller fields of the last two weeks, take a day and just play 36 holes or start the tournaments on a Wednesday and ensure a Saturday finish. If the Tour and Coca-Cola were agreeable, even move the Tour Championship to the west coast and get the back nine of the last big stroke lay event of the year close to prime time.

The reason that October’s, January’s and March Madness have become so memorable is because that anything can happen on the biggest stage. The players are buying into the FedEx Cup, why should not the Tour give them the same opportunity?