Playoff Fever: Plainfield! Plainfield! Plainfield!

Let's be honest, no one cares about the playoffs unless points resets are your thing, which is why we at least have our Fantasy League (with prizes from Avis and Callaway!) to keep us company. Two top players are limping in if they're playing at all (Hank Gola reports), Rory McIlroy is sitting out the first round and it'll be tough to top the 2015 majors.

But we have Plainfield for this week's first playoff event, The Barclays! This means two weeks in a row of Donald Ross designs, and as we saw last week at Sedgefield, there is something about those green complexes, the strategy and the intimate scale of the old style venues that makes for great tournament energy.

In 2011, Plainfield was soft from a wet summer and then was made even more forgettable by Hurricane Sandy.

This time around, the course is said to be in amazing shape by the PGA Tour's advance staff, the hurricane's are staying away and this Donald Ross masterwork should be a lot of fun to watch this week.

Ran Morrissett's Golf Club Atlas review is several years old but he makes the key point that this is one very special use of a property with more standout Ross holes than just about any course he created.

Gil Hanse has overseen restoration work here, with more tweaks in advance of this year's event at holes 15 and 16, as Tripp Isenhour reveals in this video report. The 18th will be driveable again, as Isenhour explained in this Golf Central report.

Coverage begins Thursday on Golf Channel at 2 pm ET, but those who've signed up to the PGA Tour's streaming option can start soaking up playoff tension at 8 am ET.

Video: The Story Of Plainfield's Wes Mensing

Tim Rosaforte looks at the short but prolific life of instructor Wes Mensing, who died in January at 27 but left his legacy at Plainfield (site of this week's Barclays) and beyond with his many students.

The moving and beautifully told 8-minute feature:

Sharp Park Notches Yet Another Victory...

Someday there will be a medal of some kind for Richard Harris, Bo Links and everyone else who has fought to save Alister MacKenzie's Sharp Park and maybe even see it restored some day.

The evidence is in the latest Hail Mary attempt by the one-man band left trying to stop a restoration of wetlands and someday, the course.

From the SFPublicGolf.org site:

Wild Equity, a small environmental litigation firm founded by a former staff attorney of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, brought the lawsuit to stop San Francisco from installing concrete pier footings and a retaining wall at a pump house at the southwestern corner of the golf course. The concrete work was only a small portion of a dredging and pond-building permit approved in April by the Coastal Commission. The project is intended to improve the habitat for protected frog and snake species at the golf course, while reducing flooding risk to the golf course and a neighboring residential development. Wild Equity’s lawsuit named the Coastal Commission and San Francisco as defendants; the San Francisco Public Golf Alliance joined the lawsuit as an intervening defendant, to represent the interests of the public course golfers and historic preservationists who treasure the venerable golf links.

This is the fourth time in recent years that the courts have rejected environmentalist groups’ challenges to operations at Sharp Park Golf Course. The United States District Court, Northern District of California in 2012, and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and San Francisco Superior Court in 2015 all dismissed prior law suits. Lawyers at San Francisco-based Morrison Foerster have represented the Intervener San Francisco Public Golf Alliance, on a pro bono basis, in all the lawsuits.

Same Length Irons: Will DeChambeau Start A Trend?

Here's a smart and timely filing from Mike Stachura at GolfDigest.com tackling the question many have in the wake of Bryson DeChambeau's powerful US Amateur win, watched by several thousand: what about the same-length shaft idea for my game?

Stachura does a nice job explaining the backstory of DeChambeau's thinking behind his club set, his Edel Golf created clubs and the history of such ideas. And boy did this bring back a deeply buried memory that made me feel very old:

In the late 1980s, Tommy Armour Golf pushed a set of irons called E.Q.L., based on the idea of a single swing. These clubs were built to 6-iron length. That set never gained real traction, perhaps in part because the company’s 845 irons were exceedingly more popular. While there is something of a technology lull in the iron market today, Dechambeau’s method is at least getting some buzz.

But before you head out and cut all your iron shafts to 7-iron length, you better recognize that you’re going to need more than one adjustment to make it work. And it might be an adjustment that standard golf clubs can’t possibly make.

“We are all used to swinging a golf club that’s basically D0 to D4,” Choung says. “So if we just arbitrarily cut these things down and didn’t have the ability to adjust the weights on it, you could end up with a 3-iron that’s super stiff with a swingweight of C3.”