Are American Ryder Cup hopes on the backfoot already after worst PGA Tour start in 22 years?

Keegan Bradley will look to win back the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black this September.

West Coast woes signal early Ryder Cup concerns for Keegan Bradley as Europe fire first shots in 2025.

“We are gonna go to Bethpage to kick their f***ing ass.”

The f-bomb dropped by USA Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley following America’s 18.5-11.5 Presidents Cup win in Montreal.

Season 3 of the Netflix docuseries Full Swing captures the jaw-dropping moment Bradley laid down the juiciest gauntlet fans on both sides of the Atlantic could have hoped for.

Irrespective of the results come Sunday, September 28, the battle-cry will go down as the moment golf’s fiercest rivalry reignited.

“Oh yeah, we’ve all seen it,” said a grinning Shane Lowry ahead of the Cognizant Classic.

Some may argue it was a mistake to provide Luke Donald’s buoyant band of European brothers with any more ammunition to cause an upset at Bethpage Black. Others will applaud the nastiness that was all but absent for large spells in Rome with Team USA looking a shell of the players that we are used to seeing dominate the PGA Tour week-in-week-out.

The start to 2025, however, has been anything but business as usual on the leaderboards as pointed out by golf statisticians DataGolf.

Before World No.222 Brian Campbell’s Mexico Open victory, Harris English’s Farmers Insurance Open triumph was the only American win in the opening seven-event Hawaii and West Coast stretch.

Further, the potential Team USA candidates only notched up 21 top five finishes.

To put it bluntly, it is the worst start to a PGA Tour season by American players in 22 years.

Ryder Cups are notoriously difficult to win away from home.

Despite only seven American wins from the last 20 editions, Team USA still took the spoils in three of the last four matches on home soil. And by a minimum margin of five points.

It’s why they will likely tee it up at Bethpage Black as comfortable favorites.

That said, the uncharacteristically slow start to the season has seen the market become less certain with odds drifting from a relatively stable 4/6 to a slightly more volatile 8/11.

There’s a lot of golf to go under the bridge between now and then, however.

And let’s not forget, it wasn’t until this time last year that Scottie Scheffler registered the first win of his glittering 2024 season at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

With seven months still remaining before the New York showdown, Bradley is unlikely to be overly fazed by the sluggish start of his 2025 hopefuls – of which he presumably includes himself. The key acid tests are yet to come, beginning imminently at the Players Championship as golf enters major season once more.

A more rational concern at this stage should be the insanely priced tickets for Bethpage Black, that are set to put fans back $750. It’s a three-fold hike compared to Marco Simone, which saw swollen grandstands adding their weight at every opportunity to the European cause.

Despite outpricing the masses, Bethpage is still widely expected to be one of the most hostile Ryder Cups ever, especially now Bradley has riled them up even further.

“It will make Phoenix Waste Management Open seem tame,” said one New Yorker.

The destiny of the 45th Ryder Cup is far from known, but its tone is unmistakably set.

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